And the Serpent Shall Poison the Heavens
by Turms
Summary: Zurg meddles with powers he scarcely understands, and puts much more than the fate of the Galactic Alliance in jeopardy. Now, it's up to Team Lightyear and a couple of unexpected allies to save the day.
1. Chapter 1

AN: I haven't read anything on this site for several years, so possible similarities to other stories are accidental. Reviews are much appreciated!

* * *

**...A****nd the Serpent Shall Poison the Heavens**

CHAPTER I

Somewhere in the very border-space of the Galactic Alliance lurks a quiet, technologically superannuated solar system. Traffic between its handful of planets is extremely slow even during fusion crystal crash-sales, much due to the fact that most of its sparse population relies on old-fashioned junkyard spaceships. This hillbillyish astronomic object has simply been known as_ Solar System_ for eons now, which says something about the imagination of its natives.

Near a red hunk of rock dotted with the humongous ruins of ancient desert irrigation colonies, a bluish-green planet slowly revolves around its tilted axis. Its nickname, The Muckball, does not quite agree with its appearance. Thanks to the efficient waste allocation load lifter technology and other environment purification gimmicks its nomenclaturally uninventive population once left behind, plus a few peaceful centuries, the planet has finally re-acquired its true nature: bright, clear-watered seas and vast, ebullient forests. Albeit fresh, they, for the most part, sadly lack the teeming life of the far-off yesteryear. In many a woods, now only the wind howls hauntedly, remembering the ages when herds of well-fed creatures grazed the fields and the hunter never settled to sleep with an empty stomach.

As mentioned before, brainpower of certain higher capacity still trailed its surface and the neighboring worlds, even if the grand majority had fled the spreading pollution already during the second intergalactic kingdom of Tau Ceti. Nevertheless, this underpopulation and general isolation from the more advanced galactic quadrants had placed a hefty toll upon the culture. Superstitions and misinformation the Galactic Alliance usually frowned upon had spread far and wide. If the casual intergalactic adventurer managed to bumble one of the practically dead languages the suspicious and introverted bushwhackers currently spoke, likely only a few would know the name of the sitting president.

This story, however, does not concern over the ignorance of these natives, but of someone else's. It is also a tale of treachery, the price of megalomania, and perhaps of...love.

Now, let us glide towards the far north, into a nocturnal landscape guarded by snowcapped mountains...

* * *

Intense coldness hung over the sparse firs and gnarled dwarf birches. It was of the kind that bit like a swarm of particularly bloodthirsty mosquitoes equipped with hypodermic needles for some spare intake, humid and able to crawl through most clothing not officially stamped as vacuum-proof. The fluttering green curtain of aurora borealis hummed gently beyond the veil of icy mist sitting right above the deep dunes of snow. Stars twinkled amid the ceaseless dance of soft light, while rime clung to every rock face and branch yet peeking out of the white crust.

Any moment now, one might have expected a jovial old man clad in bright red to sleigh-ride across this idyllic wintery vista. However, instead of the merry jingling of bells and the swish of aerodynamically adjusted droindeer* antlers, a furious bellow rang through the air.

It was not polite. It was not jolly. It would not have been suitable for the ears of any underage Santa's Little, well, Smaller Helpers, had any of those little buggers stood present.

The cacophony was emerging from beyond one of the smoothly curving fells reigning over the landscape. Yet alas, some deuced fiend had marred more than the plain ethers here. Deep vehicle tracks crisscrossed the ground and lumps of oily, black soot peppered the otherwise so pure whiteness, while blaring floodlights broke the polar night's serenity. Grimy machinery clanked away wherever equally dingy robots lumbered about. Some distance away, a staggering spaceship sprawled on a patch of soggy, bare soil, the immense heat of its jets having melted away even a good measure of permafrost.

The original source of the incessant swearing appeared to stand in the middle of the whole chaos, although one might not have expected such a lovely rime-statue capable of emitting such blasphemies in the first place. In the strong beams of the floodlights, an almost angelic halo created by the thousands of glistening ice crystals surrounded the figure.

"Scrape it off! _Scrape it off!_ Did I not order you lack-witted sniffle-snuffling lackeys to prepare my glorious suit with anti-ice before we took off?" Emperor Zurg raved, his clenched fists thwacking at the empty air.

"We...uhhh...forgot, my Evil Emperor," a grub with a scraper in hand whimpered. Three more were furiously scratching at the metal parts of Zurg's space armor, one sitting on top of his helmet and removing tiny icicles from the horns. A fifth was scuttling towards the self-appointed piece of royalty with a whole bottle of the desired goo under one arm.

"Hrrhmhh...and yet I see _you_ scarcely _forgot_ to treat your own, inferior stooge-wear accordingly," Zurg muttered, cocking one exoskeletal eyebrow at the crewmembers. "This is an outrageous disgrace, this...this...GRARGH! Had I designed snow, or ice, or whatever confounded crap this is, with my crafty, evil claws, I would have turned it purple in the first place! Not this...this sparkly-warkly icky...uh...whatever! Now and forever more, I should radiate an aura of natty nefariousness, not appear like one of those wimpy modern vampires! Pthui! At least when I designed ol' Nossy, I kept it _in character_!"

After a while of furious scraping and spraying of anti-ice, Zurg swiped the last chips of frost off his cloak, and checked the status of his horns from a tiny pocket mirror. All appeared evilly swell again.

"Now...where was I? Ahh, indeed, the main target of this undertaking, which seems rapidly turning seedier than...a...well, a seedcake, although that comparison scraps the meaning entirely...hrmhhh... Anyhow..." He started striding over to a cluster of grubs that previously had burrowed a large hole into the mountainside. Now, they huddled before something that, despite their evident curiosity, did not look like much more than a vertical expanse of gray rock from his current position.

Zurg rubbed his hands together, making an ear-rending grating sound, and halted sharply behind the crewmembers. His tall, well-wrought frame cast a long, ominous shadow over them. Slightly trembling and squeaking, the grubs turned to face the vile grin of their master's helmet.

Ahh, this was more like it, his slightly mollified brain cells purred. So much dramatic effect could be achieved merely by placing the light sources correctly! Hmmh...perhaps he ought to employ the same tactics on Planet Z, if they verily proved so puissant. New gags were needed every now and then to astound this freak show of an imperial court, and to shoo away unwanted chumminess.

Gah, hopefully they would soon forget that whole snow angel burlesque...

He bent down to glare at the grubs, arms akimbo. "Well, well, are we getting any warmer here? Not that the actual _temperature_ should vary, but figuratively speaking. Hmmm? Or shall I perchance be told again that hundreds and hundreds of hours of laboring shall fall down to some nitwitted eulogy reading 'Egil Longwossname drew up these runes to remember his dear auntie Hróðgærðagurgle, who died of blue tongue moss'? HUH?"

"Errr...w-we th-think this time...er..." one of the beetle-like creatures piped up.

"I am waiting; do not disappoint me this time," Zurg sighed, tapping one foot against the ground. Instead of the mighty, booming clang of his throne room's metallic floor, the latter went _glurrpf blorrghff_, which quite ruined the effect.

"Er...eh...we think we've found the right spot. You might wanna take a look at this..."

The brain pod presently inspecting the structure dug out from behind the masses of loose earth and debris cut in, "Well, I do mean, when does one meet a dry stone construction of the NE7-class, 598th subclass ferric period type [Qæns-Vendel] right in the middle of the northernmost Baltiska Förbundet, eh? I say! Towards the south, now..."

"I am not here to attend a geography lesson!" Zurg snapped. "Besides, I did behold many a blasted vastness of that so-called south, _when you had to summon me here after every damned false alarm! _Trees and lakes and trees and lakes and trees and lakes and a smattering of dreadfully clad yokels capable of nothing but scowling and repeating that ugly gargle of a sentence...uh...whatever heinous heathen lingo it was."

"_Përqëlén hür-rï_? Eh, ah, I deem that would be some primitive deity of theirs, whom they, upon seeing your majestic form, began to call for their aid in the utmost, blood-churning fear!" the brain pod tried, although it sounded hardly convincing.

"Hmmh..." Zurg tapped the grille of his helmet with a clawed finger, looking thoughtful, "and I recall you telling me the same thing about those hicks on the other side of the sea muttering that _yevlaahndeh finyeh,_ whenever we endeavored to interrogate one... I wonder..."

The hapless minion quickly changed topic, and gesticulated towards the revelation. "Ah-eh... If I might attract the attention of Your Nefariousness with this-"

"I am warning you, blubbering bootlicker, if I am forced to acquaint myself with another Sven- or Ketill-infested carving of some clodpated churl not even cognizant of the charisma of the character Z-"

"Actually, my liege, they _had_ devised a letter for this splendid sibilant-"

Zurg folded his arms across his massive chest, and subtly changed position, so that his shadow fell this time directly upon the brain pod. The lenses of his helmet burned bright red. All present six grubs winced horribly, and attempted to hide behind one another at the same time, inadvertently forming precisely one-fourteenth of the stepdance pattern used in the sixty-seventh strophe of the traditional Slugavian double-wedding march.

"WHAT have I told unto you about interrupting the soon-to-be grand emperor of the whole universe? HMMM? What have I told unto you pipsqueaks about _those blasted, pointless infodumps you geekbrains keep hurling at me?_ So, fine, dandy, capital, the Egilwhatsits were slightly more civilized than one might have expected. Yet, _what of the tidings I have been anticipating for the past three years? HUH? _Alright, I admit that the last trip to this sordid savage-land of swamps and skeeters did not exhibit yet another example of a perfect disaster, as it seemingly directed us back to the correct trail. Nevertheless, _this better be the very end of the correct trail_, or I will personally select you incompetent numbskulls as the first test targets of the omni-death ray, when it finally shall gloriously arise forth from the planning board!"

Wheels squeaking, the trembling brain pod turned one hundred and eighty degrees on the spot, and zoomed to shed more light on the enterprise, both literally and figuratively.

Soon, at the servant's summons, a hornet duo pushed closer one of the unwieldy floodlights, directing the beam at the excavation. Indeed, one would not have expected to meet such a construction in the middle of a complete wilderness, not to mention inside a _mountain_. Even to Evil Emperor Zurg, used to ridiculous space opera clichés like heroes infiltrating his fortress via the air conditioning system, this seemed like something out of a pulp fiction of the lamest kind.

"This better be the real thing and not some lack-wit's idea of a practical joke..." the emperor hummed under his breath, glaring at the wall of neatly stacked, even-sized stones in front of him. No lichen grew on them, so the assembly had lain hidden perhaps from the very start. Several meters high and broad, the wall sealed off a perfectly square opening cut into the side of the fell. Right in the middle, held firmly in place by smaller rocks, sat a meticulously decorated rectangular slab. Upon it, amid intricate knots, silhouetted figures of humanoid warriors, and the typically associated monsters, snaked a string of dense writing. Well, at least to Zurg, it looked like the same brand of gobbledygook as met hitherto.

Phth, perhaps he ought to have snatched the harnesses of this operation fully into his own hands, and actually _studied_ the blasted gibberish. Now, he had to rely on some bloody bugs and canned internal organs to understand even the teensiest bit of progress. However, languages had never been his bravado. Evil scheming and bidding on rare Troll Dolls on Z-Bay, now...those posed no problems. But these pesky pests called grammar and spelling...bah. On the other hand, nerds willing to devote their pathetic lives to some primeval thingamajig were always freely available. A person just had to seek for the right one, catch them, dissect them, slam the working brain into a jar, and ka-blam. Some surrendered their minds willingly, some did not. With the latter kind, a few years of floating in an immovable tank and counting dust particles commonly did the trick.

He tapped at the slab with one finger. It made a pleasantly deep, there-might-be-a-cave-behind-ish sound. The finger sensors of his exosuit signaled that this baby had been formed of natural materials, not of some cheap plastomache or, in the worst case, projected light.

"Well, it does feel, look, and whatever it is that the rest of you can do with your senses, accurate," Zurg mused. "Now, decipher it, and we shall discover whether I must find permanent replacements for a certain part of my staff or not."

Stuttering, the brain pod began to read the inscription out loud, in a form suitable for His Imperial Monoglotness. Accordingly, the emperor's grin widened along every new word.

About one third through the winding inscription, the minion suddenly halted.

"What? WHAAT? Whaddusitsay, whaddusitsay, wannawannawannaknow!" Zurg hopped from one foot to another with excitement.

"Er..."

"Whaaaat? This must be the real deal; _what does it say_? Oooh, I'm getting chills; this is so iniquitously titillating! Soon the whole galaxy, nay, the whole universe shall dance on the palm of my hand, and that pestilential Lightyear shall be but a damp squish mark on the sole of my boot! Uahhaahahaahaaah! Rwahahahah hohoho hoh huaah hiih! Tell me the rest of it, now! Prettyplease?"

The grubs observing their master's sudden congaing in the snow shrugged at one another. No matter how many years of steady in-house employment, one just never got used to Emperor Zurg's insane mood swings.

The brain pod coughed. "Well, it does confirm that within lies either the _Second_ or the _Third_, in addition to devoting a whole verse to the one we seek. But...the rest. I am...I am afraid I do not recognize the language. It utilizes the same alphabet, alright, but otherwise appears to lack even the remotest of similarities, with, well, anything."

Fortunately, Zurg let this one pass, thanks to his newfound state of mind that soared somewhere far above the definition of jubilant.

"Bah, whatever. Regarding the usual content of these stones, it might just as well be someone's laundry list that got added in later." Eyes shining with glee, Zurg rubbed his hands together, making a grub or two fish out earplugs from their back pockets. "Ooh! Crack it open, now! Ahahaah, this is like one of Nana Zurg's Easter eggs: full of sinfully delicious chocolaty goodness, and it shall all be mine! MINE! UAHHAHAHAHAAH HUAAH HAAH!"

Behind the emperor, who had just dug out a little horned party hat from the mysterious recesses of his robe and set it to teeter atop his helmet, an elderly grub raised a cautious hand.

"Uh...Your Wickedness, if...if I may be so bold as to...a-ask something?"

"Hmmh, I _did_ recently say something about interrupting me when I'm gloating, but I shall let it slide this time. Now, what is it?"

"Ah-um...is it wise that we're, erm, poking our noses into something of this ilk? Figuratively speaking, obviously, seeing as none of us actually sports a nose, saving of course My Evil Emperor. It's just that...this feels like meddling with the occult, and nothing good ever comes out of _that_."

"Huh? And wherefore should anything _good_ come out of my ventures? I'm a bad dude and meddle with bad things! Why, I'm practically _kvlt_ myself! Indeed, I am so br00tal and trve, that instead of the common black tosh, I only listen to _purple metal_! Now that's what one might call meddling with the kvlt!"

"Eh...naturally, Your Br00talmost Kvltness, but...do we actually possess any true knowledge of how to handle, erm-"

"Handle schmandle. Now smash that blasted wall open, before I return to my ol' cranky self," Zurg snorted, dismissing the worried servant. "Or, better do it myself, as, once again, I am surrounded by naught but lily-livered milksops! Bah, why does the employment agency for evil overlords insist on sending me these sissies even after years and years of complaining? Hrrmh, thought they might have finally learned."

With an impressive swing of his cloak, Zurg took a step back, and raised his right arm towards the rippling curtain of the aurora. In a flash, the partially pliant nanotube tech of his suit encased half of the limb inside a bulky, four-cannoned blaster. He was just about to fire a hefty load of plasma at the obstacle, when the brain pod stopped him.

"Wait! Don't do it! That might cause trouble to anything..._organic _residing within, or perhaps beyond!"

"Hmm. You may have a point. The...erm...plant? You think it might affect...?"

"Well, nobody can tell where, or even _when_, the next point of continuity might exist. Perhaps my liege might spare the plasma blaster for something slightly more...smashing, pardoning my pun?"

A moment later, Zurg was greedily following at the steadily widening hole in the wall, as individual stones were neatly laser-cut out and carried away. At one point, he found himself unsuccessfully trying to gnaw on his gauntleted fingers through the grille of his helmet, which merely resulted in one of those hideous scratching noises the poor ears of the grubs scarcely tolerated.

One more stone, two more stones, and then I can jump in, he chanted in his mind. One more stone, two more, three, and then the first step on the escalator leading to the ultimate domination over _everything_ has been conquered... One more...

When the opening, started from the upper right corner to prevent any collapses, reached down to a level about a meter above his head, Zurg could resist the temptation no longer. He jumped up like a spring in caffeine high, caught a hold of the edge, and with a single fluid movement hoisted himself up and over, into the yawning dark chasm beyond. Briefly, reddish light replaced the prior gloom.

"One heck of an acrobat for his age, eh?" a grub mused.

"Well, they do say laughter is the best medicine to a number of ailments, probably even seniority. And he does laugh a lot, I grant you that," another responded.

"Come on, you loiterers!" Zurg snapped from behind the wall. "I do not stomach such lallygagging when I am laboring away in... Wait a twinkl...ooh, this is-"

"Yikes, prolly some trouble ahead! Get the ladders up, now, hurry, hurry, hurry!" the nearest grubs shouted almost in unison. More crewmembers and mini-hornets spilled out from behind various pieces of machinery, guns at the ready. Nonetheless, when the scattering of insectoids poked their heads past the hole's lowest rim, they found the overmaster of all things purple gawking awestruck at a rather peculiar view.

A huge, cave-like chamber wrought into the bare stone of the fell opened before them. Sections of the walls had been inlaid with white quartz, now awash with a bloody tinge from Zurg's flashlight. A minimalist's nightmare, some bygone workaholic equipped with a particularly sharp chisel had sculpted and engraved every inch of rock with mind-boggling detail. The heads of many snarling beasts glowered down at the company from the heights. Along the walls, warriors fought their eternally frozen battles, seafarers faced the perils of the deep over and over again, strange creatures attacked one another, women raised their drinking vessels to hail a battler riding a spidery-legged steed, among myriads of other epic spectacles.

Above everything, an enormous ouroboros encircled the whole pageantry, its head dipping down to touch the floor near Zurg. The single yellow eye, shaped of some glassy, honey-colored material, seemed to scowl at this impetuous group of intruders. Everything bathed in a chthonic silence. For once, even Evil Emperor Zurg had been struck dumb by something other than purple and z-lettered.

The ceiling represented the most curious aspect of the whole complex. It looked like one gargantuan tree root, twisting and curving some twenty meters above them. Occasionally, it would branch and touch the floor in a pillar-like manner, yet always folding back into itself, even if that meant passing through the gaping maw of a stone beast or the puffy pants of a sculpted warrior. Even the emperor's sharp wits could not discern where the root began or ceased to exist. It merely _was_, an anomaly in space-time.

"This...this...this, oh, this sinister splendor!" he finally managed, tears glimmering in the corners of his eyes. "Oh, I must take fashion tips! Ah, this organic touch is simply marvelous in contrast with the sharp edges; we must get something akin to this into Dreadnaught's throne room immediately! Inject a bottle or two of the Essence of Purple into it, and that should do away with the yucky poo-color."

"Uh...I don't think we should remove...er...well, this-" someone blurted.

"Not _this very one_, you dolt! I daresay I do apprehend the nature of _this_, and it shan't and probably can't be merely sawed off in a jiffy. Nah, pilfer something from Rhizome, and toss it into the mutation chamber. We'll figure out something peachy with the lads and lasses down in the Cryptobotany Department. Now, however..."

Slowly, the emperor set out to explore the uncanny hall. He did not pay too much attention to the lavish decorations any more, having now a completely different goal in mind. Battle scenes...yesyes, he had faced a fair few of those during the past decennia. Nothing novel or spiffy there, and his weapons certainly would overcome those lamentable ferrous sticks a zurgazillion times.

Besides, abandoned temples and whatsits of this caliber frequently harbored the typical array of booby traps: spiked pits, poisonous darts, rolling boulders, and a wad of other insipid implementations. Craters, how could it possibly come to pass that culture after culture-even cave-aliens separated by tens of parsecs and devoid of spacecraft tech-always repeated the same, predictable set of contrivances? Gah, what an interstellar Gordian knot indeed.

He progressed more cautiously now, tapping the walls and floor tiles as he did so. For some unconceivable reason, the T-ray scanner of his lenses refused to function properly, and any possible sinister mechanisms embedded into the walls remained a mystery. Odd, indeed. He would not have expected such primitive lowbrows capable of comprehending radio frequency blocking. Unless this phenomenon had something to do with...well.

He let his gaze sweep crosswise the chamber, and along the tangled loops of root-ceiling continuing into the far distance. The grubs following at his wake remained silent and fearful. Something truly was amiss here, in an eldritch kind of fashion. Take those blasted black shadows dancing across the further reaches, now... Bloody jumping blazars on a stick, the doorway was practically stuffed with high-intensity floodlights, which should have rendered that kind of darkness impossible!

He had a nasty feeling that the final destination of this part of the quest skulked within that accursed wannabe special effect. Anyway, it was getting on his nerves. How dared it simmer with such vain bravado before his wicked might? No other who or what or even _when_-and the very least of all some cloud of occult-y wossname-was permitted to frighten his dear ol' grubsies; that was a privilege reserved only for _him_!

"I shall NOT digest any more of this damned abracadabra and oogabooga!" he snorted, clenched his fists, and activated his rocket boots. At least that way, not a single, sneakily rotating flagstone was going to surprise him. "Come on, I deem our terminus lies ahead, beyond yon, uh, root-loopies."

He pointed at two underhanging sections of root that apparently marked a boundary of some kin. The wavering, raggedy shadows seemed clumping together just behind them, forming that annoying bit of impenetrable gloom.

"Hmm...a nebula of some exotic matter could always come into question..." he mused, air-parading onwards. Nevertheless, that hardly explained why the hall felt much longer than what his plain sight registered. The distance to the root duo should have been a mere twenty to thirty meters, not two-three _hundred_. Furthermore, he ought to have reached the...infernal obscuration many times by now.

That blasted botanical bizarrity must have served as the major culprit. Perhaps it truly perverted reality somehow, possibly opening wormholes into alternate realities, and...well. Had he not pried one such warp open himself, and discovered the horrendous fate of his failed 'twin', an emperor demoted to a pathetic burger-flipper? Craters. And yet...

Above, the ouroboros slithered frozenly, and the beast heads snarled mutely at the trespassers, their green and amber-hued eyes seemingly burning with a fire of their own.

Then, suddenly, Zurg noticed that he had flown past the pair of curious upside-down columns. With that, everything turned dark.

* * *

_Schnick, fl__ick. Snap, snip. _

_Flick flick flick zip._

Emperor Zurg swore under his breath. Why did NOTHING WORK? Every switch only pivoted back and forth, dead as an incinerated slug. Moreover, he did not possess the faintest inkling of his whereabouts, or whether he even might have lost his consciousness for a while. What _was_ this bloody blackout bubble, and why did only Nobody respond to his calls? Not a single mechanical part of his exosuit bothered to jump alive, not even the handy flashlight extension.

Triple craters.

Fortuitously, he was not some dolt barely graduated from the preschool for teensy weensy evil overlordlings, and always carried a few backup plans in his pockets.

The internal cooling of his marvelous evil armor had obviously also busted. Dancing damocloids, his brains might start soon melting inside this sweat-inducing bucket. Just as well, the lenses were less active than a fossilized sloth inside a lump of dried concrete, and thus utterly useless.

He unscrewed the helmet from its vacuum seal and grumpily tossed it over his shoulder. It went _clang_ against what sounded like the familiar fell-rock. Hmm, perhaps he still lingered somewhere inside the mountain, even if...well. The air was still cool and humid, but nowhere near the bitter midwinter frost that had soiled his entree back...uh...over there somewhere. Wherever _somewhere_ was, that is.

He brushed damp hair out of his eyes and began rummaging around in the folds of his robe. Even if concepts like _dark_ and _the blackness of an endless abyss_ appeared all badass and inspiring in theory, one, alas, had to rely on light to get some sense into this world.

Now, marching practically back into the Stone Age made his techno-savvy mind weep. Yet, were not these, uh, stereotypical mystic caverns supposed to contain luminous mushrooms or something? Why had he been so cruelly denied of the privilege of mushrooms? Grah, he wanted his shrooms, and NOW!

None cropped up out of the darkness, no matter how hard Zurg squinted. Eventually, he created his own light with one of those ancient fossil fuel igniters.

Blinking in the pool of light, he goggled open-mouthed at the surroundings. He still stood inside a cave-like chamber, alright, but perhaps indeed in a different reality. Raggedy white mist-not the icy kind of the snow plains but clammy and unpleasant-hung in the air. The giant root yet knotting and spiraling above him pulsated slightly, as if pumping sap, or...whatever it was that plants did on their leisure. To his right, a gray, unadorned wall loomed beyond the shrouds of white. To his left, now...

Abruptly, a grin of harebrained enthusiasm spread on his face. Hah! Jim-crackin'-dandy, _there it was_! That construction could possibly play no other role, unless it purposefully attempted to decoy any explorers.

Zurg sighed. Well, since the pods and the confounded creepy-crawlers had more or less temporarily deserted him, there was only one way to find things out.

He started walking over to the low, circular structure of austere stone stagnating upon an ever-so-poky hill, all too aware of the dreadful racket his boots made against the flagstoned floor. Well, the insides of bedrock belonged to one of the quietest places the universe could hide in its mists, so perchance he ought not to be too worried about the effect.

Or, should he?

Oddly, he found himself slicking back his messy hair and coning his beard with his fingers. What if the...uh..._it_ was not there? How was one supposed to awaken...uh...something like that anyhow? Sing a song? Yodel? Cha-cha-cha around the well? Burn a sacrificial cow and offer its heart to the...thingy? Those old scrolls had never prepared him for _this_. Perhaps,_ just perhaps_, he might have advanced too rashly...

What if it found evil emperors a tasty dish?

Besides, he had already indulged in all that swearwordy noisemaking back there, and nothing had answered. What if it comprehended merely that disgusting heathen lingo that occasionally sounded like a pigeon trying to coo backwards? Also...eh, no. His doubts concerning the truth behind these ancient legends had utterly melted, no matter how many suspicions had spun around his skull only a few hours back. That half-rotten manuscript had illustrated most details correctly, not to mention all these recent, eerie experiences that kept merely adding grains of truth to the growing heap of testimony...

Ah well, he had stepped into the figurative dragon's mouth now. The knee-high ring of the gaping well jutted out of the floor mere inches away from him. Absently, Zurg fingered his beard. Should there not be a...a bucket and a winch or something lying about? Or, had they even invented such advanced machinery back then?

There and then, he decided to tear the annoying suspense into shreds. He rapped the nearest stone hard with his knuckles, booming, "Hello? Anyone down there? I, Zurgamaxantas of planet Xrghthung-simply known as 'Z' among friends, family, and foes-order you to awaken!"

The chamber's many-faceted walls multiplied Emperor Zurg's call, making snatches of individual words bounce around and mingle with one another. Finally, even the last reverberation died away, and the former sepulchral serenity ensconced the knoll of the well again.

He peered into the darkness of the hole. More swirling shadows greeted him instead of a reflection, and no bottom could be discerned form this distance. Frowning, he was just about to toss in some rocks, when a great jolt made his legs buckle. After a moment, the ground trembled again, and a dense cloud of dust blew out of the well.

Coughing and wheezing, Emperor Zurg knelt by the ring of stone, holding onto the edge. The dreadful rumbling, grinding noise of shifting stones now issuing from every direction conceivable made both his ears and teeth ache. Even the very bones it reached, chilling the blood and tensing every nerve on its unstoppable journey.

Zurg briefly wondered whether he had unwittingly risen onto the arena of his last judgment. All those poor ickly grupsy-wupsies that would now become bereft of his guiding hand, shedding salty tears of lamentation at their master's passing in the eternal night of Planet Z...

One more mountain-quake shook the hall of the well beneath the root. The raspy, thunderous subterranean base of a voice that finally answered his summons felt ghastlier than all the unearthly experiences of today stitched together.

"_Hvat er þat manna er í mínum sal, verpumk orði á?_"

* * *

Footnotes:

*Droid reindeer. Real reindeers were slaughtered beyond extinction during the War of False and Anti-Santas**, and unfortunately, their DNA had not been preserved either.

**This war flared up when the, allegedly, real Santa got heavily fed up with all the imposters and particularly the novel, tradition-opposing movement of Anti-Santas: blue-clad women who insisted on stealing the previous year's Christmas presents of wee li'l innocent tots on the following Midsummer's Eve. Finally, the so-called true Santa won the bloody feud with the aid of craftily placed mistletoes that brought his adversaries together and calmed them down in a fairly mushy manner. It is said, that a couple of centuries later Santa forsook his ancient home and moved to North Polaris, where he has kept headquarters ever since.


	2. Chapter 2

AN:

Warp Darkmatter: Thanks for your review! It's indeed been a while since I touched anything relating to BLoSC, but I'm trying my best to keep the character personalities intact. As for inspiration, I draw much of it from the different genres of fiction and textbooks I read fairly extensively.

* * *

**CHAPTER II**

Muzzily, Emperor Zurg pried one eye open. Everything in his vision swam with fuzzy outlines, while his head felt as if twenty bee colonies had built a collective hive within, together with some spare ants and crickets. He attempted to raise a hand to touch his face, but the addressed limb merely twitched a couple of times, and slumped back into its former lethargy.

He could register small, very dim spots of light right above, and the softness of bed sheets around his recumbent body. So, he still walked the land of the living, even if his thoughts traveled onwards with the speed of a one-legged spider. This was the old familiar hospital room, complete with the pungent smell of disinfectants hanging in the air.

He tried to utter, "Is this blasted bedfastness over yet? Were you able to mend it?" That, however, collapsed down into a most pellucid "Wzzhrrsshhh?" and a line of spit creeping down the side of his jaw.

"Careful, my liege," a familiar voice somewhere to his left told. "Take it slow and easy now; the anesthetic will wear off eventually. However, if Your Ghastliness can understand my speech—even if your, eh, full vigor has not yet returned—I can deliver you the, um, good and the...well, slightly worse news."

Zurg's other brow beetled ever so slightly, which meant he was not content with the latter part. Nevertheless, he blinked his other eye three times in sluggish succession, which signaled agreement.

"Ah-heh heh, the mind is already as cutting as a triple UV laser, eh? Well, splendid, then. Uh, Your Highness must understand that we practically had to rebuild the optical nerve first, which had been badly shredded in the process, not to mention the infection and the gangrenous membranes in the..."

Brain Pod 501 halted, as it spotted fresh beads of sweat on its master's forehead.

"Eh, not to worry, not to worry! I am certain we were able to repair it dandily. It is merely that I also had to open the left side of the cranium and insert in a handful of biochips and neuron connectors, besides a small bone transplant, to guarantee...eh...optimal functioning. The...erm...damage to your oversw...em..._magnificent_ imperial head proved, regrettably, more extensive than anticipated. By all the trans-neptunians of Oort, whatever _happened_ to you on that journey? Something must have hit you heavily on the back of the head in addition to...well."

Zurg sighed mentally, as physically performing that action brought out only more of those embarrassing blobs of saliva. If he only knew himself...and presently, he hardly yearned to plunge into the swamps of introspection.

"Anyhow, everything ought to have healed up quite well by now, and we may remove the cast as soon as my liege feels strong enough to sit up. Ah-eh, and I assure you, your hair will grow back in a trice!"

At this, Zurg's visage turned into an ugly shade of puce, and the eye not covered with a Zap-O-Recovery®™© casing seemed to bulge out of its socket with fury.

"Only small spots, only small spots!" the servant interjected. "Comb the rest over them and nobody shall ever notice!"

The brain pod, who worked as Zurg's personal surgeon, shrugged in her mind. What _was_ it with that bloke and his absurd hair fetish? Granted, his mind twisted and spiraled more than fifteen corkscrews stuck together, but craters, he always _stuffed it inside that ridiculous chamber pot of a helmet_, thus completely nullifying the effect of expensive hair care products! Nobody ever saw it anyway! Unless Zurg lead a double life and was, outside his emperor's costume, secretly the disco king of Mahambas 6 or something...

Furthermore, she could not understand his fear of seeing his own body injured even the bittiest amount. He never hesitated to flay, dissect, dismember, mutate, or cyborgize practically _anything _out of general curiosity. Yet, when it came to pricking his _own_ precious finger with a pin... What a whiner. Of course, drilling sections of someone's skull open never represented a small operation, but nonetheless…

On the other hand, it would have been so easy to stop all this insanity by snipping just a single, strategic intracranial artery, once she had removed the bone. No more rattlepated plots in the lines of conquering the galaxy with the aid of five-dimensional reverse bees that would destroy the Galactic Alliance's crops by traveling in time to the previous year to unpollute the plants.

Fear had once again crept along her nerves and subdued the rebellious thoughts. Nobody could tell how the aftermath would progress; perhaps with minuscule odds, she might be able to hijack a small vessel. Yet, even with the emperor dead, a gaggle of hornets would certainly blast her into ashes during mid-escape.

These days, mutinous ex-stooges were far more easily caught than perhaps five years back, thanks to the renewed security systems. A sturdy quantum-processed monitor listened to all comlinks, fixed and wireless alike, without forgetting to check the unused frequencies for any weird encryption patterns. Outside help was difficult to come by. Unfortunately, the suzerain of all strivings sinister had learned his lesson with shady bounty hunters. Especially with the kind that cropped up in different shapes and sizes, but always wore the same damn costume. Still, even that had lasted amazingly long, until a particularly loyal grub had tipped the emperor off.

Well...

Now, once more, she had let him live, simply because _she _wanted to live. This existence hardly clung to the fancy promises once made, but outmatched yet many other alternatives, like rotting somewhere under the doodah of a giant radioactive cow. Or something.

She glanced at Zurg while tinkering with a new infusion bottle. The master appeared slightly calmer now, so perhaps she could disclose the remaining tidings. Hooboy, he certainly was not going to take this lightly…

* * *

"Now, we tried to match the color as well as we could. With those frightening red lenses on, I assure Your Balefulness that nobody shall ever notice the difference!"

After a couple of hours, the surgeon occupied the monarch's bedside again, together with a smattering of other medical professionals. One grub held up a large, horned mirror in front of Zurg, while another peeled open the layers of healing aids covering the right side of his face.

For once, the emperor sat quiet, merely frowning at his sulky half-visage in the looking-glass. The brain pod regarded this as quite ominous. The man was not clearly himself; commonly he raved, roared, and hurled around bucketfuls of expletives if irate. Now he merely…brooded.

Finally, all the wrappers peeked out of the trash bin and Zurg could unadmire his full appearance with all its wrinkles, sections of shaven skin that had already gained a new, strong growth of hair, and…

A new right eye filling the empty socket that had gaped back at his cronies ever since the return from the cavern beneath the mountain.

It bore a strong semblance to the left one. However, if one looked at the iris closer, they might perceive minuscule mechanical structures merging with the genuine organic cells.

"Well, what do you say, my liege?" the pod cooed. "Getting used to light and various distances may take a teensy weensy while, but I am sure Your Nefariousness shall master all that in less than a ziffy!*"

"Hrrmpffth."

"Now, why don't you try moving it around, instead of merely…eh…studying at your magnificent reflection? The existing muscles we attached to the newly grown ones need a great deal of exercise."

Grumbling, Zurg began to peer across the room. A few seconds passed, and the pristine peeper decided that the medical gimmicks hanging down from ceiling were far more interesting than the purple skele-bunny slippers on the floor, and rolled around to inspect them.

The emperor growled, trying to bring his eyes into focus. This caused the look of the implant to swerve down along the bridge of his nose and into the right corner of the room, so that eventually one pupil pointed straight forward and the other barely peeped from the corner of the socket.

At this, Zurg's face split into a dreadful rictus of a snarl. He grabbed both the grub and the mirror, and flung them across the room and straight against the wall opposite. The latter smashed into a thousand pieces, littering the near grounds with sharp shards of glass.

Any outside spectator might have wondered why Brain Pod 501 suddenly let out a mental sigh of relief. Understanding Zurg, however, represented its own brand of high magic. It required turning all regular logic so many times upside down and inside out, that it, in fact, changed into sheer _illogic_.

Yet, even chaos concealed an order of its own, and most of the staff had learned to predict the rollercoaster pattern of his mood swings by now. The old temperamental master seemed to be back, instead of this sullen shadow that merely slumped between the sheets. Somehow, she had found this state much scarier than the ordinary mania.

Zurg's physical strength had not visibly diminished during the long rest either, thanks to all the neural stimulants and other ultramodern whatsits taking care of his body. Another adrenaline burst, and he might have turned half of the planet of baby unicorns into a squelchy red mess with his bare hands, had some whimsical wormhole born out of the cosmic radiation suddenly teleported him into such an unlikely place.

"GET THAT BLASTED EYESORE WORKING, and _RIGHT NOW_!" the emperor bellowed. "Doesn't this just can your kumquats? I am about to conquer the universe here, and cannot look like some bloody poppy-eyed pigeon! How damned credible is _THAT_? When I last made plans to increase my deviousness level, they never included acquiring a bad case of skew deviation!" He raised one long finger to his lower lip, and tapped at it thoughtfully. "Of course, if all things eventually go awry, there's always that mad scientist appearance to consider, even though I shall never admit the existence of any mental perversion, at least not officially. There's a clear line between insanity and _eccentricity_. Nevertheless, if I dyed my hair white and messed it up properly...hmm...some strong hairspray might help...hummm...no. Lab coats have never tickled my fashion buds; they do not billow, and furthermore lack that oh-so-dandy aristocratic panache. Hence, I shall not surrender my throne, so my vision must be fixed RIGHT NOW or I shall, well...DO PLENTY OF EVIL, which I ought to do anyhow as an evil overlord, but...hrrmhrrh. Now, where was I...?"

During the emperor's rambling outburst of mixed anger and contemplation, the surgeon pod had fetched a neural tuner complete with electrodes, oodles of multicolored, blinking lights, and a single, large red button. Even though uniting nanotechnology with the elements of organic intelligence played no novel role in the circles of intergalactic innovation, Zurg still considered it so impressively sci-fi that some traditions had to be preserved.

"Ah-eh," the brain pod cut in. "This may twinge a bit, and...well... Your Villanousness must understand that getting used to the implant truly _requires exercise_. I might be able to adjust the learning algorithms of the chips up to some degree, but, well, like I sai-"

Zurg grabbed Brain Pod 501 by one noodly appendage and yanked it so close to his bared teeth that mist formed on the surface of her transparent brain-dome.

"Then why, if I may venture to propound an inquiry, do I otherwise feel all groovy and hunky spunky, except for this _ONE THRICE-DAMNED EYE_? Of course, I haven't walked yet, but usually my extrapolation talent skims the underbelly of one thousand on a scale of one to ten."

"It's just that...y-your body has not be-become a-accustomed to it yet," the minion stammered, staring straight into his over-sharp teeth. "If my liege recalls the time when we had to replace a couple of your fingers after that unfortunate incident with those Bathyosian chainsawfish? Ah-heh, I must say that I am still quite proud of the neurally stimulated under-nail lasers; fine for both cutting breakfast salami and getting rid of pesky Space Rangers! Anyhow, Your Wickedness _did_ experience that quite natural phantom limb effect for a while, not to mention the first difficulties with holding objects. We did-"

"Enough with the glibbering gibble-gabble! What about Darkmatter? You twittering twerps _took his whole arm off_, and, I am told, later enhanced his...well...certain capabilities to attract ladies. Yet _he_ never complained. Much."

"Well, he does not fully share your genetic makeup, not to mention that, eh...you are almost twice his age."

Pursing his lips in consideration, the emperor released his clutch on the brain pod. She wheeled back with relief and dug out a handkerchief to wipe away the zurgy steam that now dimmed almost half of her brain-dome.

"Hmm...you actually may have a point, as rare as that is. Unless you're _purposefully_ messing up with-"

"Eh, l-let us see if I could tune the chips a tad," the servant interrupted, fidgeting with the electrodes. "Now, if my liege would sit back and relax..."

"By the way, did you even bother to fix that nearsightedness problem?" the emperor sniffed. "I daresay I find it rather ridiculous to use reading glasses while _wearing a helmet that already includes special lenses_. It's like topping a helmet with another...which, incidentally, I have done on construction sites, but merely to pose as a role model for those wee'er grubs too spellbound by the spirit of youth to heed all safety precautions...hrrhmhh..."

"Yes, yes indeed, and the eye can do other, quite impressive tricks too, if I may be so bold as to praise my own handiwork."

Zurg cocked a brow. "Hmmh...and how about my _left_ eye? When I last checked, I couldn't read my naughty lettering well with it either. Or, do I hazard to guess_ that you incompetent schlemiels forgot that entirely and now I need new glasses again_? HUH?"

While the emperor looked the other way, the servant gesticulated at a pair of grubs standing in the doorway, and rapped at the left side of her dome. They instantly pulled their overlord's helmet down from the hat stand and scuttled out with it towards a descending stairway.

"Not to worry, not to worry! The clever boys down in the shop are improving it even as we speak..."

* * *

About a quarter of a day and two sturdy meals later, Emperor Zurg had felt strong enough to resume his duties. Now, he strode along a dark corridor somewhere in the western horn of his fortress. His gait seemed steady, and his puffed-up chest radiated assertiveness. His helmet wore a threatening expression, which was, depending on the audience, either improved or turned more ludicrous by the eye patch. The brain pod had tamed some of the implant's foolhardiness with the neural tuner, but the emperor still felt better about covering the pestilential thing, at least until he had hammered a bit more sense into it.

Beneath these imposing coulisses, however, a part of his mind resembled something fluffy and squeaky hiding behind a bush.

He, Evil Emperor Zurg, the scourge of the galaxy, could not show even the slightest outward hint of being mortally afraid. Not even to the walls of an empty passage.

The corridor bathed in a complete silence, save for the clang of his boots against the floor. The shrieks from the torture chambers and experimenting labs somewhere in the bowels of the tower never reached this secluded area. These rooms served as a place for study, incorporating a portion of his extensive library, among other odds and ends.

_Clang, clong, clang_, the imperial footwear racketed.

Craters. He ought to have carpeted this confounded hole eons ago. Always some bloody bug with equally clonking shoes skittered the whole length of the space when he immersed into reading. Phooh, an extra furnishing project carefully supervised by him would at least steer his mental cycles away from...

Somewhere under his suit, droplets of cold sweat rolled down his skin. The echo of his footsteps reminded him too much of the fatal walk in the cavern beneath the mountain, while that dreadful ring of stones loomed ever closer and closer... Soon, he would bend down to gaze at the swirling shadows deep in the well of...

Suddenly, he skidded to a halt, one clawed hand clutching at his chest.

_Had those shadows in the far end of the corridor just __stirred on their own? _

Breathing raggedly, he stared at the purple gloom in front of him. No, no, no. He must have imagined it. Probably one of the holopaintings malfunctioned again. Sodding nuisances the lot of them; always rippling, and shimmering with the wrong colors. The purple bits had turned out the most vexatious, as they always faded down to pink in spite of frequent projector software updates. Blargh, never should he have bought Compu-Klerm OEM software, no matter how titillating the price. Lousy support, only 'lite' versions of updates available to non-premium customers...not to mention that the software itself was so riddled with anti-piracy protection, that his savviest grubs had not managed to reverse-engineer even the oldest copy of _Portholes Panorama_ yet.

Zurg sighed. Bloody jumping Bok globules, his brainwaves were indeed running amok. Nothing uncanny had ever infested this passage. Why, it was one of his favorites...

Then again, the..._thing_ from the depths of the well resided within the same building now. Whoever knew what kind of influence it might possess over dimensions and reality... Ugh, no, no, NO! He ought not to brood over such matters! The fate of this galaxy and beyond would soon lie on the palm of his evilly glinting hand, and his iron fist would crush, squash, squish, mash, squelch these puny, pathetic, blubbering-

Right there and then, he recalled _another_ hand. A hand formed out of pure darkness, a solid shadow-claw with needle-sharp nails, gouging out his...

With trembling fingers, he touched his right temple. Involuntarily, he began to relive the whole dreadful episode, beholding the ancient well broadening out before him instead of the cozy, purple darkness.

He never had prepared to face any of it. That damned pod had made everything sound so utterly easy peasy lemon squeezy. _Merely recite the lines we practiced together, when and if a voice indeed calls up to you, and that should be it. Do not falter, or the spell might break._ Hah, effortless as ABZ, verily. Either the sniveling lackey had missed something, or great chunks of crucial knowledge had simply been lost during the millennia.

Nobody had warned him about thunderous roars, earthquakes, or about...the shadow-wight. After he had repeated that string of twangy gargle the minion had apparently devised himself, the revolving shadows dwelling within the seemingly bottomless shaft had suddenly shot up, forming the humongous figure of a headless man. Standing there, on tenterhooks, he had at first regarded the being as something similar to his old Shape Stealer, and momentarily dismissed the whole show as a shoddy jest. However, a quick observation had concluded that this was no insidious nanotech or even a column of exotic matter, but a _ghost_ of some kind.

It had hovered for a while in front of him, its ragged stump of a neck brushing at the root far above, while seemingly measuring him up and down. The echoes of the spell and the grating of subterranean boulders had now faded away, and the hall had wallowed in its erstwhile hush. In spite of an utter lack of wind, the frazzled shadow-robe of the specter had swirled around the emperor, while his own cloak had hung rumpled and inert. Every stretching second had felt like a decade beneath the ghost's sightless stare. The rush of blood had filled his ears, the _thwunka-thwunka-thwunk_ of his ferociously pounding heart sounding like an ominous drum roll that heralded the outburst of something even more sinister. He had not dared blurt out a single syllable, in case something might go hideously wrong.

_Do not break the spell, do not falter, do not turn your back on it..._

Then, everything had become a painful blur of events. The shadow-wight had extended one hand towards the emperor's gaping visage. Before even understanding to resist, pain had blossomed in his head. His vision had abruptly lost all dimensions, and through his own scream and the searing ache, he had briefly registered the shadow-fist closing over a single, bloody eyeball.

Then...well. He could hark back hardly anything, save for reeling dots of light and the stomach-churning sensation of falling down from a great height. Afterwards, the grubs had told how he had staggered out of the gloom between the two pillar-like portions of root, helmet askew, blood on his hands and badly shredded robes, hauling the very thing they had sought for all these years under one arm. Emperor Zurg himself possessed no conscious inkling about that intermezzo. Neither had the servants apparently ever witnessed anything fitting their master's short adventure, only the blackness in the end of the long hall, never managing to reach it.

His following recollections painted the medical compartment of Dreadnaught with wispy watercolors, while someone droned on about an infection and elevated intracranial pressure in the background. Then, painkillers, antibiotics, more painkillers, sleep, the occasional flat image of a bedpost sitting against a backdrop of laboratory instruments, sleep, sleep, sleep... Sporadic better days had brightened up the feebleness, and he had been able to consult his doctors and the bugs in charge of the ongoing project.

He slapped the side of his helmet with an audible clang. Hairy craters and bloody blazars, he had to compose himself! Weeks had been wasted by shillyshallying in the bottom of a bunk, his precious thoughts wading through endless, sticky mud pools, thanks to all those deuced soporifics! He was an evil emperor and could not afford being infirm! Sickbeds were for ol' grannies that got visited by wolves and kiddies in red hoods, not for virile tyrants riding the summit of their glory! _Twice the age of Darkmatter, trauma to his head_...hrrmrffgraaah, he would show them the meaning of _trauma_, once he taught this blasted eyeball not to eyeball the wrong directions all the time!

Huffing, he resumed his earlier march, most of the dread now diluted by the rising irritation.

Grah, _why_ had he ever removed his helmet in the first place? Or, would the ghost just have punctured the theoretically impenetrable zurgazopic xrgogh'hqonic alloy and ripped out his prize anyhow?

He needed answers, and one Yulesockful was not enough. Even a mere _enough_ was scarcely enough.

Reaching the end of the corridor, he pushed the sliding door violently aside. The minion studying a large tome in the middle of the chamber beyond squawked in surprise.

"_What_ went amiss? I demand to know everything, NOW! And you, you blithering moron, are going to teach me to speak that heathen lingo, no matter what it takes!"

* * *

Upon a snowbound hill stood three men. Far above, the northern lights hummed and wavered softly, stars occasionally winking in the mists of the red waves. An ancient legend of the land told that a fiery fox ran across the firmament during the winter gloom, batting the snows with its tail.** Hence, even today, the aurora was called 'fox fires' on a local language. Beneath skies somehow so unreal, old beliefs indeed died hard...

Living fire. That was how one might have best described the wild hair and beard of the tallest of the observers. Of course, one also might have dug out a fancy literary embellishment from the myriad pieces of shoddy self-insert fanfiction plaguing the Galactic Alliance's communication networks, where characters like Hime Ravenheart Nekodesu Angeldust Moonbunni charmed elvish princes, pirate captains, and young wizards over and over again with their unearthly beauty—and oftenmost—that kind of hair.

Thereafter, such depictions ran straight into a speeding ten-ton train. He, once in the dawn of ages, might have represented a handsome figure, but the burden of years had ravaged his visage and donated him a slight but permanent stoop. His companions appeared scarcely any younger, and could be outlined _comely_ only by a person habitually squeeing over something fitting the crusty old barbarian stereotype. Of course, even these occasionally did crop up in standard fanfiction. With short roles, they commonly served as a quick lunch for the first troll or dragon, which the leading Mary Sue then slew with the pretty pink sparklies of her magical scepter. Nobody named after mixed anime and goth terminology, however, graced the vista with her presence, so perhaps this was about something else.

The trio had clad themselves peculiarly regarding the fierce coldness. Perhaps they, in those kilts and winingas and odd scraps of leather, actually felt comfortable, as nobody sported so much as chattering teeth. Judging by the ski trail meandering behind them, this was but a single rest point on a longer journey. Now, they frowned down upon a half-demolished fell. Fresh snow had already covered most of the ugly vehicle tracks, but it would take centuries from Mommy Nature to trim the gaping hole in the mountainside.

The completely white-haired man next to the redhead muttered something, his bristly brows crumpling so much that they, together, resembled a furry albino banana. The latter gazed at him in return, giving a grumpy nod. The last man, his gauntleted but otherwise bare arms folded across a vast barrel-chest, acquiesced in merely scowling mutely at the soiled landscape.

None of them desired for this war to flame up, no matter what the old kennings claimed. However, who else could have stolen him but the Wanderer; who else could have torn asunder the home of the one who had only wanted to repose in solitary quietude for the rest of his days? That bloody bastard beyond his stupid bridge had never respected the pacts anyhow, even if this time everyone's hopes had soared ever so high. Had not the maw of time guttled thousands of years since the previous strife? Whatever damned between the high earths and the lower heavens could his motives be?

The redhead's eyes burned as if with an internal fire. No, no, no! He would not abide with the threat of such destruction! There had to be a means to impede this mighty madness...

* * *

Footnotes:

* Like a jiffy, but with more zurgishness.

**As is the case of many legends, even this one does not answer the question 'Why?' What did these foxes achieve by this? Were they feeling too hot? Did they hate snow? Did they deem that white contrasted too strongly with their fashionable flaming coats? Only one of those foxes would know, but hitherto none has bothered to contribute an answer.

* * *

Please review!


	3. Chapter 3

AN: Thanks for the reviews and encouragement! Sorry it took a while to update; I definitely have no plans to abandon this fic. :-)

* * *

**CHAPTER III**

A week later...

"...hatching his most diabolical scheme yet!" Buzz Lightyear interjected, holding one finger dramatically aloft in the air.

"One'd think he finally might change the tune, after all these years," XR muttered behind his commanding officer's back. "Classic Phrases of Captain Lightyear and all, own a signed copy myself, but this is getting plain ho-hum."

Team Lightyear alternately stood or lounged around a long briefing table somewhere in the ileum of Star Command Headquarters. The room weltered in a total chaos, appearing worse than a library after a hurricane. A straggle of papers, coffee mugs, and holographic documents decorated every available horizontal surface, while two large mail containers—unsealed letters and hastily piled folders leaking out of the shelves like bookish entrails—hulked near the door.

Beside XR, the slightly worried Jo-Adian moved a step backwards, and managed to capsize a whole tower of papers, which, according to the universal domino effect, propagated the offer to have an interesting meeting with the floor to other near-standing mini-mountains of the same kin. Some seconds later, XR had vanished, and the offender stood waist-deep in a deluge of sheets, wringing his hands and grinning sheepishly.

"Don't mind me, I'm just demonstrating some new office survival techniques here," the robotic ranger snorted somewhere nearby.

"Um...sorry about that..." Booster dipped one arm into the papery sea and scooped his friend up. "I just still get kind of jumpy when Buzz talks like that... What if Zurg really _is_ hatching his most diabolical scheme yet?"

"D'oh! Zurg's losing his touch, and that's a fact. Remember five months ago, big guy?" XR began, once back on the safe ground. "I didn't even bother to count how many times that litany became repeated during the operation—which was actually sixteen times, because someone who is practically a computer cannot help it, no matter how sentient—and what did Zurg's grand, cosmos-shaking design turn out to be? Spreading mothball dissolvent into the atmospheres of a couple of planets, so that pests would devour everyone's winter clothing, as a consequence of which innocent citizens would catch deathly colds! That was just...beyond lame, not to mention that a third of these planets were _tropical_! Huh, even Saturday morning cartoon villains manage better these days; I almost feel sorry for him. Seriously, whoever even uses something like _mothballs_ these days, when the market bursts with much better repellents?"

"Still...it heinously claimed the lives of two traditionally-minded elderly citizens, and that is no laughing matter!" Buzz fingered his chin, his eyes narrowed. "Besides, it could all be a clever ruse to mislead us! Perhaps he's pretending weakness while secretly concocting something so vile only one who has long studied the footpaths of his evil, twisted strategies might fathom the extent of it... Hmm... Now, look at this. Months and months of, admittedly, sub-quality plots but with a wicked purpose nonetheless, and all the while he has been striving for something completely different behind our backs! I am certain that these _subterfuges_-"

"Yesyes, we _know_ you take a personal interested in Zurg's insanity. But what's so universally _vile_ about looting speck-sized museums and whatsits on some rock of clodhoppers beyond the reach of most stable hyperspace routes? Sounds like something every Trade World denizen would do, besides selling their grandmas in the nth generation," XR harrumphed while picking up scattered papers.

"I...I'm not sure," Mira cut in yawning, bent over yet another square foot of office chaos. For the past hour or so, her tired eyes had merely brushed over the lines of text, hardly taking in any new information. "Buzz might be right, though. Remember that case with Natron a couple of years back? I later heard the whole mess started off from a single artifact stored in the vaults of Capital Planet Museum of Intergalactic Prehistory. Next the LGMs found Planet X, then Zurg interfered, and...well. Besides, he's been unnaturally silent after that mothball incident. I, ah, well...eh..." She rubbed her eyes and blinked hard a couple of times. "Well, I thought he might've finally cracked and maybe taken a vacation, given the recent...well, like XR said, but this actually _does_ show something's going on. Maybe we should take this...seriously?"

"_Something_ does not equal the imminent destruction of the galaxy by an invasion of evil space mummies! Which just sounds so cliché I would rate the odds of such an event ever happening minus googolplex to one, had I not actually experienced a close shave with one myself! Never-the-less," the robot rolled over to the desk and angrily stamped at the date on one of the documents with an angry finger. "Look at this! An alleged theft from some dingy collection of rock scrawlings, dating back to the previous year. Another from twenty months ago. We wouldn't even have heard of such pointless, petty thieving, had not the ol' bucket-head started demolishing some nature reserve in the colon of that...Urghth or whatever."

"Earth," Buzz corrected, thumbing through a thick wad of sheets complete with detailed maps. "The planet's called The Earth."

"Earth? What kind of name is that for...well..._anything_? It'd be like calling Bathyos _The Water_ or Rhizome _The Plant_! What kind of verbally challenged, insipid..."

Across the table, Mira grimaced and gesticulated at the blabbermouth robot to shut up. He, however, appeared to pay as much heed as a dead amoeba.

"...jejune blah-people would-"

Buzz cleared his throat, brows knitted, a faint redness spreading across his cheeks. "While I do admit that my ancestors did indeed possess their flaws, I unfortunately cannot agree with your statement about 'jejune blah-people'. The history of the species named _homo sapiens sapiens_ represents a colorful mesh of-"

"Eh...? But...I always thought your family came from...well...Morph?"

"That is indeed the case. However, The Earth is the noblemost ancestral home of all humankind, which is why I am taking a deep personal interest in this case and will not, as you suggested earlier, hand it over to Team Crockett or, as you so finely added, the paper shredder!"

Shaking her head, Mira sat up and banged her mug hard against the table. "Will you boys stop it? We won't get anywhere with this constant bickering! And why are you so crabby anyway, XR?"

The addressed folded his arms around his torso and mussitated something half-vague about his perpetual dating troubles.

"H'kay, ho-kay, just everyone sit down and calm...uh...also down. Zurg's acting more crackpotty than usual, the uncommon stillness of Zeta Quadrant worries the Commander, and Buzz obviously won't drop this assignment as it's directly linked to his...well...interests. Maybe we should just go through everything at least once, take a look at the full picture, and _then_ decide what to do. Anyway, I can't digest a single new report anymore; my eyes are so tired they'll soon fall asleep without me knowing it."

"Good thinking, ranger!" Buzz slapped his hands together. "Now, let's see what kinds of eggs of ultimate destruction the foul fiend has been brooding all this while..."

Mira sighed. Yes, XR had pinned down a serious problem in his own fashion: Buzz definitely needed something to distract him from the perpetual Zurg obsession. It might transform into something truly unhealthy in a matter of a year or two. Perhaps an emergency vacation on Rhizome might come into question. With two extra tickets for her fatigued eyes.

In spite of this, she snapped on a holographic map of the galaxy, and instructed it to pin down the particular planet.

"Alrighty...so, about nine days ago, we received circa six cubic meters of documents relating to unusual alien activity on Earth. One thing stands clear: the officials over there don't exactly know what's going on either. Or at least _some_ of them don't. Here we have reports ranging from the inappropriate probing of cows to crop circles to luminous clouds, but the newest one at least pins down an indubious image. The Foreign Office of Baltis...uh...how do you read this? Those little dots above the letters, do they mean something?"

"Baltiska Förbundet. It stands for _The Baltic Union_ in a certain, practically extinct language," XR hummed.

Mira shot him with a sharp glance. "A minute ago you virtually condemned Earth under the title of a bad joke, and suddenly you pretend to know how they speak? Don't tell me you plugged yourself again into some mainframe somewhere!"

The robot shrugged. "Blame the LGMs; I never built myself. But nope. I largely stopped being an infojunkie after that mishap, yet that doesn't stop the odd residue from floating about my neural networks. Those data erasing algorithms don't work for _everything_, you know, especially if a part of one's circuits resemble a tangled-up hypercube. But what does it matter? Every team needs a handy mobile know-it-all/translator, especially when they're decoding ancient hieroglyphs or gibberish spoken only by minus 0.313 persons living in the center of a black hole."

"Uh...fine, whatever. This nevertheless," Mira pointed at the bundle of sheets Buzz had just leafed through, "shows that at least someone over there can distinguish patterns in weird activity. So...this document from The Baltic Union records several demolitions of sites with apparent pre-historic value plus break-ins to museums. In some cases, local natives have sighted a large purple warship, while a few braver ones have voluntarily disclosed information about 'violent questioning' by...eh...mind you, this is not _my_ wording, but a direct quote, 'violent questioning by bloody effing giant bugs and a codswallop-speaking bastard in a skirt, obsessed with some stupid outlandish letter and sissy colors'."

Cheeks shimmering, she cleared her throat after catching Buzz's disapproving scowl.

"Hmm...eh...well. But...no direct attacks against cities or even flights over busier settlements, so obviously Zurg has wanted to keep this undercover. Eh...as undercover as _possible_, obviously, since...eh...that description is _pretty accurate_ despite the...ah...colorful language."

"Then we have what appears to be a boxful of Zurgish debris collected from the outskirts of some mountain..." Buzz stood up and trod a few times around a container with soil and odd scraps of metal peeking out of it, frowning as if a pack of miniature evil emperor clones might jump out any moment now. "Didn't the LGMs analyze this yesterday?"

"Yup; contains no explosives, hazardous chemicals, or contagious substances, only traces of grub DNA and, well, trash. So we can conclude that Zurg actually did visit that particular place quite recently. Then, we have this...other lot." Mira sighed and inclined her head towards the mishmash of papers crowding the other end of the table. Topmost sat a blurry, holographic photo of an old bottle cap hanging from a piece of almost invisible string, failing miserably in its task of pretending to be a UFO. "Hard to figure out whether even a single per cent of those relates to our arch-nemesis. Quite sad to notice, that this clutter of nonsense came bundled with the real deal from the only Star Command Office of the planet."

"Maybe they, out of general curiosity, wanted to see whether someone up here among the high and mighty top brass could forge any sense into their tricennial collection of x-files," XR mused.

"Hmm...such a lack of professionalism from the model citizens of the Galactic Alliance is unacceptable," Buzz muttered. "It is our sworn duty to protect the galaxy from the dark forces of evil, and not plague our fellow Rangers with such outrageous misinformation! Hmm, I doubt that any higher-ranking officer has executed a proper inspection on that misdemeaning office for a long while either."

"He just can't spot a prank, even if it danced naked around him, wearing a blinking duck suit, can he?" the robot hummed almost inaudibly somewhere near Booster. "I also fear he's crafting yet another excuse for us to visit that odd hunk o' rock. Incidentally, why is _dark_ always associated with evil? If I happen to prefer dark blue to periwinkle and evenfall to daytime, does that automatically label me more untrustworthy than-"

The Jo-Adian, however, seemed to catch only the middle of XR's mumblings, and practically shouted, "Hot rockets! Do you mean we're going to visit the home of Buzz's ancestors? That's so exciting!"

"That's the general plan, ranger. We must find out what Zurg's up to."

"Wh-ww-wait, wait, wait," Mira cut in. "We're talking about a journey of several _weeks_ here, aren't we, and that's just to reach the border space of Earth! Are you certain we can risk-"

* * *

Meanwhile, in the hindgut of the charted space—when the galaxy thus becomes anthropomorphized in order to achieve a certain narrative effect, one surely cannot hand over any of the nicer body parts to represent a whole quadrant devoted to stinking foulness—Emperor Zurg peered into a gloomy cell through a set of thick bars reinforced with a triple energy shield. These were mostly for show, however, since nobody knew a flying hippo's tail about the actual powers of the dweller within. A splash of washy light spilled in from where the monarch stood, but it grew so weak midway through that the rearmost parts bathed in a deep purple dusk.

A set of glowing, blue eyes stared back at Zurg from the darkness, accompanied by an unnatural hush. Only after a while of silent observation did he, at least partially, comprehend the reason to this.

That blasted creature _did not breathe_. Well, considering its state, this ought to have stood out as a self-explanatory detail, but...was he truly dealing here with something from _the other side_, or did this nitwit merely attempt to bamboozle him with a well-crafted exoskeleton? Somehow, he still refused to accept that those uncanny events of late had indeed been achieved without holographs and special effect gurus. Rationality—or at least a Zurgish, rather mangled and perverted form of it—endeavored to overtake those deeper, more primeval levels of consciousness shivering and cringing with dread before the unexplainable.

Then, there was this...this peculiar, oppressive sensation that kept plucking at his nerves. He could not put his claw fully on it, but it felt slightly like...well...like having a constant, unreachable itch on the inside walls of one's skull during the stuffy, stifling hour of treacherous calmness just before a violent thunderstorm. Gah, the thing must have somehow created it to...

Zurg shook himself mentally, hacking asunder the railway under the onrushing train of thought. No more of this ridiculous brooding! The blasted wight ought to feel the heebie-jeebies because of _him_, not the other way round! MRAH! He lorded over its powers now, and had paid a hefty price for all the upcoming evil fun of universe-conquering and population-enslaving. Time to show that the laser-stare of his lenses drilled through more adamantine substances and layers of consciousness than those bloody travesties of light bulbs! Well, at least once he'd get fully rid of the eye patch...

"Have you...spoken to it at all since the departure from Earth?" he inquired of the brain pod fidgeting squeakily next to him.

"Yes indeed, Your Abominableness. It does not wish for anything to drink or eat, only...silence and darkness. Uh...preferring preciseness, I reckon we ought to refer to it as _he_, since...well. Anyhow, he finds this place depressing, the music taste of the guardian grub dreadful, and would prefer to return to-"

"Don't tell me that deuced nincompoop with the intellect of a frozen cow hoof yet again defies the will of his solemn master by listening to Justin Bieber here in the blacker than black heart of my evil empire? RARH, I shall bake him into a bug pie for this; I shall-" Zurg roared, almost shaking with sudden, over-boiling fury.

"Uh, my liege, please do remember your blood pressure! At your age, one should be careful with sudden adrenaline bursts-"

"CRATERS, DO NOT BELITTLE MY DEEP PURPLE VIGOR! Why does everyone keep doing that these days? I feel as sprightly as a fawn on a springtime meadow!" After muttering something semi-inaudible under his breath about never getting a rollator or a rocking chair, Zurg turned his attention back to the wight.

"Furthermore, I'm not here to listen to any maudlin, mawkish mummery about weeping hearts and Motherland's sorrow upon seeing its sons being forced into the far-off unknown! That puny...uh...whapping mallard-head is to STAY HERE no matter what, and that's the final dot in the end of the sentence! No buts or ellipses or whatever stupid grammar-y effects of indecision there are!" he growled, his good eye blazing crimson while the right behind the eye patch obtained only a washy shade of pink. "Now, open that blasted door and we shall proceed with the first interrogations. Hrrmpfft, I had presumed that my deviously bright mind would have grasped that irritating lingo—Old Morse or whatever—in a week's time, but perchance some slight overestimates plague this case. I wonder why a supervillain of considerable experience and an extremely high IQ cannot manage the same as those prissy teenling heroes in fantasy books... Or am I reading too much into that...? Bah, whatever. Anyhow-"

There and then, a deep, rumbling voice, like subterranean boulders shifting, issued from the dungeon.

_"__Hvers fregnið mik? HAH! Ósnotr maðr þykkisk allt vita..."_

Involuntarily, Zurg flinched, the unpleasant memories he had attempted to stifle all week long flooding back into his mind.

Huh. Huh-uh. Well, at least he had brought back the right bugger. His ears had never met the equivalent of that over-bombastic voice with its strange harmonics. It made one's goosebumps' goosebumps erupt into goosebumps. Hrrhmh, wherefore could not he, the embodiment of all cosmic naughtiness, bellow down upon his snuffling stooges with such tones? Mayhaps the helmet required again a couple of tweaks, not to mention the new syncing issues with the lenses...

Now, however, he attempted to hide the momentary relapse of imperiousness behind a haughty stance.

"Well? What's it blathering on about? Haven't you twerps told it that it's extremely rude to prattle on and on in some gobbledygook not all of the present company understands?"

"Err..."

"This-" Emperor Zurg began, but hesitantly left the sentence hanging in the air. Slowly, both he and the brain pod turned to goggle into the blue glow of the prisoner's eyes. An odd vibration had just passed through the ether, and the oppressive sensation at the edge of Zurg's consciousness had begun squirming and bristling, as if irritated, questioning tendrils were reaching out to burrow into his very thoughts. Apparently the ambulatory encephalon could feel it also.

Fine, he had dealt with mind powers before, like those of the pestilential Tangeans, yet this bore no likeness to anything he had hitherto experienced. What in blazes was that thing up to?

_"__Hwæt syndon gē | þē þus hider __cwōmon__? _

_Nū gē, mīnne geh__ȳ__rað__ ān‐fealdne geþōht!"_ the rumbling base rolled forth again, yet with a hint of faltering shading its various harmonics.

Nonplussedness took over the brain pod. "Um...er...I'm not sure I understood him... It's as if he had changed the lang-"

The blue pinpoints of light in the darkness flared angrily. Soon, the whole dungeon rang with a strident oath, dust falling down from the ceiling as the forceful echoes bounced hither and thither and jumbled together.

_"Oi Ikutaara taivoinen | Pitkänen pilvenalainen, _

_kunpa nuolesi napsahuttaisit | vimmaiset vasamasi veistäisit, _

_sinkoaisit selkään säköpäitten | hivusille heikkomielten! _

_Miks' herätettiin ikiaikainen unen unholasta koetokseen kiusalliseen?" _

Then, a great harrumph, and the voice continued with calmer tones. Somewhat astonished, Emperor Zurg witnessed the wight meandering through an assortment of inflections and sentences that grew less and less impalpable by the second. It was like listening to a very linguistic rockslide. Finally, his ears seized the entire meaning of one, even if the expressions tasted quite archaic.

_"__Once anew asketh | one of __Bölþorn's blood:_

_Whate'er __wantest thou | proud-helm, purple-clad?"_

Arms akimbo, Zurg glared down at the brain pod. "Huh. It speaks our tongue! Why did you biscuit-wit claim it only twaddled on with that Old Horse?"

The servant lowered his voice down to a whisper, tossing a furtive peek at the cell, as if afraid that the dweller within might hear. "Eh...it's _Old Norse_, my liege. Begging your pardon, but I had no idea about this. My sources unfortunately aren't, as Your Reverence has seen, all that consistent. Please understand that we're dealing here with a creature of immeasurable age and wits, both far beyond our own."

"Twit." Zurg brushed away the minion's concerns with a wave of his hand. "There's no such thing as _a wit beyond mine_, except maybe for when it comes to all these pointless languages. _Wisdom_, now, that's a different matter, and I crrrrave to unearth the secrets of auld lang syne this well-ghost, as of yet, hides from me! Besides, when I'm the ultimate master of the universe, a single language shall rule all my slaves, which also ought to reduce the odds for secret rebellions, as anyone found gabbling something unintelligible shall be executed forthwith. And now..." he addressed the being wallowing in the gloom. "As for you—Whatever your name is. Can't pronounce it and shan't even try; that's one of the perks of being an evil emperor, no need to follow all the conventional social norms—I'll list my demands shortly. However, if you indeed can speak like everyone else, what was up with that blasted pasquinade inside the cave and afterwards? Huh? Such insolence is just the salt upon my snails, indeed! Lots of time would've been saved, had you bothered to manifest your skills a teensy weensy bit earlier!"

"I think it might be because we've hitherto talked to him only in Old Norse," the brain pod put in.

"Hah, it did hear_ proper speech_ already in the cave, and doubtless scads thereafter from the grubs! It has no excuse for this buffoonery-"

_"__Harken to the Hel-mara harried; |__ the sheerest sooth spaketh he!" _the wight retorted, indicating the minion,

_"__Thin-spun tides were those |__ rare the reasons, rightly _

_f__or sons of Albion to fare forth |__ set sails for a northbound ship-road._

_W__esterly wisdom, tongues seldom-spoken | had I, alas, nigh-on mislaid_

_during the dreamtime deep-rooted | e'entide everlasting!_

_Yet finally found I fain | __the way to my word-hoard!_"

Thereupon, the eldritch voice lowered down to a hissing snarl.

_"A __warrior well-wrought thou mightest be, | silver-gauntlet, strong-corselet_

_but __heed thy haughty oaths | stand ware of thy tricksy tongue! _

_Kennings keen-said, __steadfast | to thy will bind me:_

_Yet Yme's young __| frets fleering mouths;_

_scorn for scorn __| a boon for a boon!_

_If I yet fared free | __roamed the rime-woods of yore_

_holmgang hog-wild__ | wouldeth will thy weird!_

_With m__any a might-rune ready | vaunting a Völund-blade bright_

_would I avail afore thee | hew thy hauberks, sunder thy swords!_

_Be yet warned | __ wanderer of welkins: _

_For e'en on this harry-hour__ ne'er | quaileth kithless the cold-born; _

_p__ower yet bideth | beneath the boughs,_

_underneath the root of Ash ancient | Élivágar's eagres ebb ne'ermore!" _

Finger poised aloft in the air, Emperor Zurg almost snapped back a petulant retort, but in the last second closed his mouth. A speck of cautiousness huddling in the bottom of his mental cesspit of evil plotlings had just trilled a warning. The wight was manifestly annoyed, and angering him further might pose the risk of losing more body parts, or perhaps worse. The emergence of the familiar language had shred apart some of its alien nature, but nothing had yet dispelled the eldritch aura questing seemingly every cranny of the ethereal plains. Whatever the latter actually meant, but the heavily superstitious warlord of Pyxis 71 trumpeting his ridiculous views on the mailing list of evil overlords frequently used it, and somehow it seemed to describe perfectly the...well...whatever those ethereal plains had been called before the invention of this expression.

"Hrrhmph, very well...uh...well-warden. I shall extend my courtesy further than commonly, but just this once." He tossed an irritated glare down at the servant. "And don't you groveling body parts and whatsits start nurturing any..._ideas_. I still got the Bubble of Torment ready for those demanding _courteousness_. I'm an evil emperor; I can't dance around throwing flowers, singing 'I love you, you love me, we're a happy family!' to every by-crawling puddle of protoplasm. Now...open that blasted door! This corridor echoes too much and I don't wish to share my world domination plans with every deputy assistant of a junior sweeper!"

Dithering, the brain pod wheeled off to type the entrance code. "Uh...Your Sinisterness? I still think we ought not to hop into this so rashly. If you'd let me peruse through that manuscript I disinterred from the Gamla Uppsala archives, I'm certain we could-"

"Pish-posh! I have a universe to conquer here, and for too long has that Star Command served as the icky fly in my cosmic soup! Besides, where do I need some stupid scrolls, when the collected knowledge of countless centuries couches a couple of clippity-clops in front of me?"

The cell door stood finally open. Slowly, Emperor Zurg trod in, and intentionally left the lamps unlit. In the tremulous light, he could just distinguish the podium upon which the being perched—or lay, or whatever it was that the blasted phantom did—besides masses of wavy, fair hair, which appeared to possess a life of their own. Even now, despite the air moving as much as a soleless sandal inside a block of concrete, they snaked and undulated around the sharp scowl of the burning eyes. There were no pupils or whites; only luminosity so intense it nearly hurt to look upon.

_"Woven into words | bound into bundles_

_hast thou yet nay__ | thine avarice unsung," _the quite definitely non-avian jailbird orated.

In his mind, Zurg groaned. Why did the wight have to sound like some bloody fantasyland prop? He'd only ever met that kind of language in dweeby movies infested with magic rings and suchlike rubbish, based on even dorkier books that no-life nerds with the physical fitness of an unborn jellyfish devoured during the small hours. This would become one brain-wracking hour of questioning, if this poesy braggart entirely refused to accept the existence of the prosaic form. Those outdated metaphors were already giving him a minor headache. Funnily enough, it appeared to compose more normal-sounding sentences with that snooty-uppity Old Gorse, so it had to be snidely deliberate.

"Well, shall we proceed with this _avarice unsung_ of mine, then?" Zurg asked, not able to conceal the sarcasm that unwittingly crept into his voice. "You spoke of the power that yet dwells beneath the Root, but what about this?"

From the recesses of his voluminous robe, the emperor produced a large scroll. He unrolled it with a triple flourish, and held it open before the wight. It featured a printed image of a block of stone carven with crude, ill-proportioned humanoid figures. One appeared to lie on its back with its hands and legs bound, while another, possibly female, bent over the first, holding a faintly semicircular object in its hand. To Zurg, this looked like a wonky taco, but you never knew.

At this, the blue gaze flared brighter for a moment, and after a few seconds, the prisoner gave a grumpy grunt of recognition.

"Ah, I see that this kindles a spark!" Zurg smirked, extending one clawed finger to tap meaningfully at bound character. After a second or two, the sharp point pierced the paper and the finger sank halfway through the hole.

"Bloody blistering blazars...you, pod, fetch me some tape here!"

In vain, the emperor tried to smooth out the tattered opening now replacing the character's face.

"Anyhow, it seems you're nonetheless familiar with...hmm...it? Him?" he addressed the wight again with a conspiratorial helmet grin, "Now... Tell me, o ancient one—What was your name; didn't quite catch it?—where is he, this Father of Beasts, as they sometimes call him? And how does one unleash him into the world again?"

The glowing eyes narrowed. All traces of residual benignancy dwindled away from that scowl now burning with a hard, icy blue flame.

"Oh, and...out of curiosity, _how do you manage it_? I mean, for a 6000-year-old ghost you seem spankin' full of pep, and little birds told me you were hardly a suckling when you became as you are now! A whole millennium represents no trivial matter! I certainly would not pout at the prospect of a prolonged life or even eternal youth..."

* * *

"...Apparently we _can_ risk it," Mira sighed, leaning heavily against the console of 42. Behind her, Booster snored in his seat, his tongue lolling out and slowly coating a patch of floor with Jo-Adian saliva. XR played half-heartedly with a very crackly internet connection, appearing quite as bored as everyone else. Even Buzz's alertness had slipped down a couple of grades. Several days' stubble shaded his jaw, while his Ranger's uniform sat quite askew upon him, as if he had not bothered to fasten even a quarter of the internal straps.

Team Lightyear had been speeding through the stupor of hyperspace* for about a fortnight now. This form of traveling, when unnecessarily prolonged, belonged to some of the most wearisome aspects of the ultramodern society, besides watching terillium carbonic alloy decompose or listening to the lectures of Dr. Azelfafageabout the socio-economic importance of spatula trading between the Theta and Kappa Quadrants during the first half of the Third Galactic Repression.

City-bred aliens oftentimes complained how the ennui of driving through the countryside practically drew them crazy, but at least they could sightsee such intriguing phenomena as clouds and perhaps a flea-ridden domestic animal every five kilometers or so. Wormholes, however, granted the journeyer nothing but stripes. Stripes formed by distant stars, stripes formed by distant galaxies... It was like crawling through a nigh-on endless drinking straw. Statistics told that _dying of boredom_ did not express a mere figure of speech in these circumstances. A stack of good books often helped people avoid such fatalities.

"Kids these days..." XR muttered from across the cockpit, "Wonder whether they get all these crazy ideas during stretches of deadening travel like this."

"Uh...what?" Mira yawned.

The robotic Ranger had apparently found a semi-working network link and now frowned at the screen in front of him. "Just trying to kill a few of these pests called Time here... You know how tweens stuff the 'net with all sorts of silly stories they concoct about movie characters and suchlike? Often plagued by truly bad spelling and grammar? Well, now they've apparently started the same with famous figures of the Galactic Alliance."

"Eh...?"

"Celebrity Fiction and Fan Works at GQnet. Oh, hey, there's a separate category for Star Command, and..." XR clicked his way through the maze of sub-links. "Oho, that's us over here!"

"Ah, those little tykes, our Hopes of Future, what wondrous creativity they have..." Buzz smiled wistfully, leaning back in his seat, stars striping the universe with infinite, fine lines beyond the windshield. Somewhere, a little fluttering personification of Tedium**, born out of the random fluxes of cosmic radiation, died of its own essence. "Obviously reiterating all our magnificent adventures against Evil Emperor Zurg's sinister strikes-"

Mira had wandered over to XR, and now peered at the screen over the robotic ranger's shoulder. Judging by her present expression, she might have striven to swallow jalapeno-spiced vinegar and rotten lemons with the speed of continental drift. Nobody had ever seen XR blush before, but now his floating grimace would have found similarly tinted buddies in a basket full of beetroots.

"Eh, Buzz? This really, _really_ doesn't look like we're _fighting_ against Zurg. Nope, not at all. Nah-ah. Oh gods, oh gods, _what am I doing with Zurg, Darkmatter, and Buzz at the same time?_" Mira cried, seemingly unable to drag her perturbed gaze away from the rather badly animated video.

"Blyurgh...at least Buzz—well, the real Buzz over yon—got the part about _creativity_ right. Never knew Mira was supposed to have three elbows per arm and a head shaped like a sideways pyramid. One'd think Zurg might've brainwashed these angelic little Hopes of Future to fabricate something of this ilk, but even his grandly twisted mind isn't this..._creative_. Gaah, _what now_?"

The Ranger duo gaped hypnotized at the disturbing display.

"That...that's supposed to be _you_, right? With Nos-4-A2 and...what's that deformed monkey with glasses on?"

"Well...the helpful caption says, '**~~~~IxUr/NusfOrrutu/NArburt quelrM OT3~~~~ ^w^ ÖwÖ KAWAIIIII!**' I'm not sure who_ NArburt quelrM OT3_ is, but perhaps it refers to Norbert Klerm- AAARH!"

Suddenly, the poky, formerly calm world inside 42 became sheer chaos, as the whole ship somersaulted sideways and those currently neglecting seatbelt regulations were flung into various corners with hideous cracking sounds. Swearing, Buzz grabbled for support and managed to haul his bulk back into the pilot seat from under the console. The lights in the cockpit were flickering, and a terrible grating sound issued somewhere from the confines of the engine.

"Everyone, back to your places!" the captain boomed over the cacophony, "Laughing emergency pl-"

A second time, something slammed violently against the ship's hull, sending it tumbling and rolling down the warp.

"Wh-what is it?" Mira gasped from behind her seat, holding onto the backrest for dear life.

"No idea. The whole computer's gone haywire," the captain nodded towards the insanely frolicking numbers on the console. 42 refused to obey, no matter how hard he hammered at the various buttons with his fist. "XR, force a manual override!"

The vessel flipped and walloped again like an over-playful dolphin. The robot stumbled across the bridge, smashed straight into the Tangean princess who had barely managed to stand up, which caused them both to topple headlong into the main screen.

"No time to play space flies, and you're on the wrong side of the windshield to start with," Lightyear shouted. "Get that override WORKING NOW!"

The following chain of events clattered onwards in a great jumble of shouts and somersets. XR launched into motion, while Booster shouted an anxious warning and the half-dazed Mira another. Both indicated at the opposite directions, which lost their meaning in a heartbeat, as 42 once again performed an impressive acrobatic feat. Outside, the stripe field of stars had turned into a madly swerving bedlam of psychedelic patterns of color and light, which never should have taken place in that elsewise so bi-chromatic boredom.

"Beginning a full override in five, four..." the robot cried, mashing one of his cables into the nearest computer port.

Just as he reached down to zero, Buzz yanked hard at the steering controls, and barely managed to fly past the massive bulge wobbling in the hyperspeed tunnel's inner wall. Only when he fully succeeded in straightening the ship's course, could the Space Rangers better discern the scale of weirdness abruptly raining down upon them. Or, more correctly put, clobbering 42 into scrap metal, if this kept continuing.

The whole left side of the normally so smooth hyperspace passage resembled a vertical sea of rising and falling swells. Just behind the vessel, one such had almost entirely eaten up the tunnel's inner space, and still distended in the manner of a soap bubble.

"Did we just get hit...by _those_? Or something that's _causing_ them?"

Mira and Booster gawked at the swells, flying sparks, and the blinding, fractal-y designs on the wormhole's surface, worth a hundred doses of magical mushrooms.

"What in the name of festering fermions _is_ this?"

"No idea," Buzz muttered. "Never seen anything alike."

"The robotic department doesn't have the faintest clue either, other than that I'm getting some se-ri-ous-ly weird energy readings here..." XR shook his head and the scientific instrument he had extracted from his mid-locker. "Blazes, I can't keep re-calibrating this gimmick every half a nanosecond! This whatever-peculiar-space-anomaly-even-Buzz-doesn't-comprehend attacking us must _really_ hate preciseness! Hmh, energy storms in some exotic dimensions might be involved, of course."

Buzz maintained the ship's position as near the wormhole's right edge as possible. Only now, he dared breathe more freely. With a free hand, he brushed out of his eyes some quite damp hair, which had spilled out of his hood during the worst turbulences. Fractionally relieved, he noticed that the newer swells grew only to about half the size of the ones left behind, before beginning to collapse again. Perhaps the danger was withdrawing.

"Shouldn't we jump back into regular space? Doesn't seem very wise to follow this course, in case that-"

"Negative, ranger. If I remember correctly, we'd emerge near the third asteroid belt of Theta Iota K7. A ship of this size would never pass through undamaged, no matter how experienced the crew! Billions and billions of splintery rocks mingled with the debris of the first Eta Carinae wars into a deadly maze where the longest distance between an unexploded mine and a discarded warhead might be one third of the diameter of our coffee pot. Besides, I deem this odd disruption is only temporary. We should be fairly safe, if we stay out of the reach of those...waves...bubbles...whatever they are."

"Um, are you _totally_ sure we can stay out of their reach?" Booster piped up, pointing with a trembling finger at the stretch of hyperspace approaching the ship. "That one looks...well...like it's gonna close in on us any moment now!"

Team Lightyear stared aghast at the crackling, fizzling surge of energy dilating so rapidly that only a narrow gap of safe space remained to the right. Yet, even that tiny sanctuary might briefly vanish...

* * *

Footnotes:

*In science fiction, this hardly ever corresponds to the actual _speed of light_. If those heroic buggers riding their clattering junkyard ships actually attempted to save the captured princess on the other side of the galaxy by traveling in _lightspeed_, they'd be mummified skeletons when they finally reached the spot which the evil overlord's vessel already left a couple of hundred years back.

**Resembles an overused, gray dishrag and feeds on dust, cobwebs, and snores heard in university auditoriums.

* * *

Please review! :-)


	4. Chapter 4

**CHAPTER IV**

No matter how gruelingly Buzz attempted to evade the crackling surge of energy, 42 belted full-on into it with a dreadful impact. The ship was sent hurtling down the hyperspeed passage into the opposite direction, where it bounced off from another swell, huge dents now decorating the blackened hull. At this point, the star cruiser's hyperdrive also gave in, while the whole tunnel around seemed to collapse in on itself.

This was a shame in a manner, as the minor but important warp drawing a slight detour past the perilous asteroid field of Theta Iota K7 had subsisted for hundreds of years without relapses. Almost nothing in this world, however, lasted forever.

Inside 42, the team shrieked with terror, as the ship spun like a hyperactive top in the fluctuations of the floundering, hissyfitting energy fields. Only a single thought filled Buzz's mind: The image of his dear crew plunging straight into that ghastly soup of exploding debris and needle-sharp rocks, ready to turn the toughest Rangers and their star cruisers into a floating mass of bloodstained scraps. This time, they most certainly were doomed. He had experienced the crumpling of a couple of 'stable' passages before—always a risky business—but never, ever like _this_.

Oh, if he only could reach the controls and do _something_..._anything_... However, the centrifugal force crushed him so heavily against the pilot seat's backrest that even breathing had become arduous, not to mention extending a whole arm towards the console. Nearby, someone moaned with abrupt nausea. Eyes watering, gritting his teeth, he tried to fight against the appalling weight squeezing him, imprisoning him into the blasted piece of space furniture, but it was of no avail.

Death would claim them briefly, no doubt about that.

Oh...he had always imagined that his passing—should the unfortunate event occur before a calm retirement in ripe, old age—would be girded by a golden aura of heroism. Falling down from a high cliff into a bottomless abyss, fatally wounded, his jetpack crushed, clutching at the robes of the vile emperor and dragging him along into the Inevitable...yes, thus it should have come to pass. Sometime later, a solemn brass band would parade through the streets of Capital Planet, the banners of Star Command billowing and snapping in the high wind, and his impressive eulogy along with the gospel of Emperor Zurg's utter defeat would be broadcast throughout the Galactic Alliance. Then, the crowds would cheer with tears of joy and sorrow glimmering in the corners of their eyes...

Buzz perked awake from the fantasy of a few heartbeats into an absolute silence. The vessel's insane bouncing and gyrating had ceased, and the rest of the team drooped in their seats, blinking and stirring weakly after the rumpus. Time around them, such as it were, appeared to slow down. Every movement became sluggish, as if in a slow-motion film. Sound still refused to enter the world. The captain attempted to speak, but globs of mere nothingness stumbled out of his mouth, his tongue feeling swollen and ears chockablock with emptiness.

His mind blazed with confusion and panic, yet he could clothe hardly any of it into the flesh of words and physical actions. Was he hallucinating? But his crew...surely they must have been sharing the bridge still with him...? Or were they simply all wide awake and zooming into the oblivion together?

Well, they told that just before crossing the border of life and eternity, one beheld a long tunnel with light blossoming at the end of it.

Light, bright light certainly now shone through the ship's windscreen, a deep azure shimmer stretching all over the horizon. Soon, an ocean of wavering blueness close over them like an infinite deluge, leaving them floating within a strange, bright void where the concept of time and distances seemingly became nullified. The nearest vibration of color outside the now inert 42 might have wallowed a hundred miles away, and the farthest a mere inch apart from the hull, or so it felt like. Order could establish its miserly monarchy solely within the realms of the cockpit, and even that was half submerged in the chaos of broken equipment and loose bits of paneling scattered across the floor.

Buzz flinched with surprise, as someone coughed. He had been so mystified by the events of the last minute—Or, had perhaps a whole hour or even a day floated by?—that his brain had never registered the return of sound, and...by the looks of it, normal movement. Grimacing at the unexpected stiffness in his neck, he turned to Mira. She was fast unbuckling her seatbelt with one hand and with the other pointing at...

To the right, something _slithered_ in the vast azureness. Not one of those gentle gradients of blue, but something far more solid, something...

Slowly, everyone gathered around one of the side windows to gaze at the peculiar view. Despite the commonly chatterbox-y nature of Team Lightyear, nobody uttered so much as a squeak. Save for XR's caterpillars, which somehow had gotten partially stuck and now sounded like multiple mice being trodden on simultaneously.

"XR! Don't ruin it!" someone whispered, half browned off.

"Hrmpf. Easy for you to order us techno-men around, flesh-legs. By the way, your knees sometimes make funny clicking noises, and still _I_ never complain!"

"Shush, you two!"

Buzz found it extremely difficult to grasp the exact nature of the phenomenon, as he stagnated there, one hand resting on the windowpane. A boundless, gently sliding wall or perhaps a curtain of some sort filled the horizon, growing in and out of focus at random intervals. The smooth diamond pattern decorating its curving surface set it apart from the surroundings, yet...in an inexplicable way, its basic essence _was _one with the world outside, one with the nothingness...

An eternal, gentle blueness, where the serenity of utter nonexistence prevailed. No Zurg, no bloody battles with evil that always resurrected in a form or another, no matter how many times one smote it down, no troubles of the ordinary life ever again...

The immeasurable vastness seemed to suck all thought out of his mind. After a drawn-out patch, only a muzzy cloudlet of vague understanding had been left behind.

This thought, now resembling more a feeling or an instinct than a strain of active reasoning, hunkered somewhere near the bottomless well of the subconscious.

Was he supposed to do something...something...anything...what? Was he supposed to..._why_ was he _supposing_ anything?

What did anything matter, when he had finally reached this dreamy heartsease, this...

Yet, beneath everything, far beneath the fluffy layers of blue-white nirvana, something uncomfortable budged. Something so ancient it bore no feasible name in his perception, something that possessed a distinct intelligence of its own.

Perhaps this odd interception pushed him back towards the gates of reality, close enough to finally comprehend that a pair of fingers was making clicking noises inches away from his nose.

"Buzz! Snap out of it! Buzz!"

He shook his head and blinked hard a couple of times.

"I can't believe this! You were ogling at the view so intently I thought you'd petrified! You _and_ Booster," Mira suspired vexedly, "It had a nastily soporific effect on me too, but...uh...I seem to have caught a headache and...eh...guess I just easily lost concentration."

Lightyear cast a side-look over her shoulder at the looming bulk of Booster. The Jo-Adian still swayed on the spot, nearly cross-eyed with daze, as if awakening from a long, deep sleep spent in the extravagant land of moonbeam-maned, flying unicorns and silver-armored knights so fair and beautiful one might have mistaken them for the princesses they were supposed to rescue.

Buzz let out a hissy groan through his teeth. "Craters. What...what in blazes is going on? While I admit to having seen things that indeed go bump in the eternal night of space, this-"

"...is heavily on the exotic side," XR continued. "Exxotic. I'd add a third x, if it didn't bring up certain..._associations_. Which I personally don't mind all that much, but _you_ might. Anyway, remember what I mentioned earlier about the involvement of unusual dimensions? Now might be a good moment to count all our hitherto undiscovered parallel universes and glitches in the space-time continuum."

Mira cocked a miffed brow down at her comrade. "Very funny, XR. Come on, this is serious! First those...wobbles, then our ship gets wrecked, next the tunnel collapses, and now this...this...creepy hypnotizing wossname! Not to mention this bloody stupid headache. Wonder where I put my painkillers." Chewing on her lower lip, she scrabbled with one of the pockets of her utility belt. Out came, however, only a lumpy globule of stickiness that might once have been a fistful of candies, and a slightly used hanky. "Anyway, our bodies can't sustain themselves on pretty colors and sparklies. A way out of here must be found, wherever _here_ exactly stands. We're already running low on rations and...well, let the list of mishaps write itself! And, yes, Buzz," she sighed as the captain was about to retort something, "I know you'll say this whole affair reeks of Zurg—although personally I think he, up close, smells a rather pleasant orchid-y type of perfume; probably uses scented detergent on his robes or something—but honestly-"

"Negative, ranger. I was trying to attract your attention in order for you to pay attention to...uh...never mind." Sometimes the ways even cavemen recognized turned out more efficient than fancy verbal expressions. He grasped Mira's shoulder, swung her about to face the void outside, and pointed.

Faint dots of light bloomed now through the flickering blueness, which had darkened into a smoky indigo while she had fronted the opposite direction. Even as she stared, open-mouthed, at the gently fading lozenges, the light of numerous other stars burst into the void, eventually spattering it with constellations run through by the shimmering belt of the Milky Way. Almost in front, the dipper asterism of Ursa Major motionlessly offered a scoopful of cold, black emptiness to distant, nebulous galaxies.

Silence.

A tiny meteoroid zoomed forth from the gloom and bounced off the windscreen with a small _pok_. The cockpit swam in the tremulous glow of XR's internal lights and the phosphorescence of the Ranger uniforms; the ship itself lay dark and comatose, save for two sluggishly blinking lights on the rear end of the console.

Again, the team stood transfixed for a good while, not daring stir, lest the universe might transform into a host of demented toucans and flap away. However, when the heavenly bodies merely pursued their age-old aim of appearing like fireflies glued to the insides of a gigantic umbrella—and thus over and over again fooling creatures of modest intelligence, newly emerged from the confines of protoplasm, into thinking about practically anything else than spheres of gas burning millions of light years away—the crewmembers tardily relaxed.

Feeling distinctly weak in the knees, Mira sat down. Some meters off, Buzz stared sharply at the outlines of far-off star clusters, and held out a hand just before the cockpit exploded into a hurricane of question marks and hesitant theories about what actually happened.

"I don't think...well. I don't think anyone can find the right answers just now, nor should we waste precious time on seeking them," he muttered, still frowning at the overhanging figure of Ursa Major. "It's more like what Mira said earlier: first we must discover our location and _then_ wonder why we haven't turned into freely floating scraps of minced meat. That's the Ranger spirit; never lose your common sense in a tricky situation!"

Next to him, Mira coughed, her cheeks suddenly purpling. With a rather small voice she confessed, "Honestly...I...well. I...uh...believed we were going to...um...die. I wanted to distract myself with something and...um..."

"No need to explain yourself, Mira. I deem we all entertained such grim prospects for a while or two," the captain grunted. "Now onto more urgent matters. XR, can you access the coordinate signaling system? My wristcom stays completely blank, but you might have better luck with your devices of superior precision. Even a weak link ought to grant a succinct estimate of our position. In the meanwhile, let's take a look at poor ol' 42. Booster, Mira, check the hull for air leaks and anything else that might jeopardize our safety. Test your comlinks. Anything that could remedy this diabolic dilemma."

While the robot extracted a swarm of instruments out of his mid-locker and other lesser-known recesses, Buzz strode over to the pathetically pulsating lights, the ship's mere, frail signs of life.

"Hmh. Curious. The gravitation simulator purrs happily away, but the remaining vital functions...one couldn't find such a hush even in the dominion of the Alliance's sternest librarian." He bit his lip and tapped at the lower blue bioLED with the tip of one sausage-thick finger. "Well, the joys of staying upright certainly do surpass those of zero gravity, but this nastily manifests about some confounded calamity grievously plaguing the fusion cells..."

"Let's hope we're still grievously plagued by confounded calamities in the _right_ alternate universe," XR commented from somewhere beneath the forest of antennae and madly whirling transceivers. "Or should I call it the _original universe_? On the other hand, to, say, Evil Buzz and his charming chums our homeverse would represent one of the alternate specimens, and some third or fourth or ynth might then again bask in the glory of its firstborn status. Anyway, we probably picked the one whose amoebas decided that the whole process of self-developing complex organs from scratch during the next couple of million years would sound too megalomaniac, and devolved back into free-floating atoms just for the sake of it! Seriously, I can't _catch a single damn sign of intelligent life anywhere_!"

"Always the most optimistic and persistent character, eh?" Mira snorted while inspecting her space suit for any damage. "Keep trying. Not even _half a minute_ has passed, and you're already giving up?"

"How can you tell _this_ universe shares our conception of time? A week might be stuffed into the span of our regular second, or we could be speeding backwards in time towards the efflorescence of dinosaurs! On the other hand, maybe we've ended up inside a loop-verse, where the happenings of a single day repeat themselves endlessly, humdrum, humdrum, everything spinning around the same axis of dreary dullness forevermore, the déjà-vu of a ten thousand déjà-vus-"

"XR! Stop that! We-" Mira's sentence however died on her lips. With a groan, she clamped both her hands on her forehead, and crumpled onto her knees.

"Mira!" those remaining upright exclaimed.

Both Buzz and XR dashed over to help their companion. When they gently pulled her into a sitting position, she lurched forwards again. This time, she threw fiercely up.

"Blast! Something's seriously wrong with her! Get the first-aid kit here, now! Mira, can you hear me?"

"Urrgghh...I...yuckgrrghplof..."

The captain carefully laid her down on one side, so that she would not inhale any liquids, should the nausea strike again. Her eyes were half-open, but the tight lines of her mouth and brows hinted about an internal pain she attempted to withhold.

"I...I think...I hit my head...worse than I...th-thought..." she mumbled while Buzz examined her pulse. "Y'know... When th...the ship kept shh...somersaulting."

"Worse than _you thought_?" Buzz sighed with mild exasperation. "Mira, Mira; albeit getting tossed around a lot, we aren't crash test dummies, only flesh and blood. Well, three of us, the very least. Nonetheless, you ought to have _told_ you weren't feeling well! Craters, I _did_ wonder about that unsettling paleness for a tad, and here you were ready to scuttle out into...well."

"Uh...it...didn't feel this b-bad...a second back. Just...some...dizziness and...uh. T-thought I could handle it..."

"The only thing you're going to handle now is _sleep_. We must re-sketch our plans and include a new shade of urgency. And you, you're to keep your...uh...paintbrushes locked firmly in the...drawer, in a manner of speaking. Understood? Keenness to confront the heat of action won't help you recover, y'know."

"Funny..._you_ should say that," she smiled weakly. The captain averted answering, but in spite of the growing mist in her eyes, she was certain she breezily arrested an awkward grin spreading on his face.

Some minutes later, the Tangean princess reposed on the flat-laid copilot seat under a blanket, an injection needle taped to one arm and an infusion bottle lolling from a hook above. The medscanner had found no fractures, but the newly irrupted double vision rumored about a concussion. Either way, she was in no condition to pirouette from asteroid to asteroid in pursuit of space spooks, had Team Lightyear's existence suddenly turned into a mickeymousy adventure musical full of miraculous supernova fireworks, break-dancing star cruisers, and heroic solos about Incredible New Worlds and Finding My Destiny Beyond Infinity.

After some more tick-tack-tocks of the clock, Booster and Buzz egressed the cockpit, on a quest to discover whether the magic touch of a screwdriver might re-awaken the nigh-on kaput ship.

* * *

Hours passed. The star cruiser swam onwards ever so slowly in the great, gloomy ocean of the cosmos, perhaps trapped into the weak gravitational pull of some distant, unknown body. Pallid, greenish light poured into the inky void from the cockpit, yet the engines of Team Lightyear's trusty companion huddled cold and stagnant. Inside, XR crouched grumpily in one corner, holding aloft a couple of lusterlessly revolving antennae. This was mostly for show, as hitherto he had only managed to catch vatfuls of cosmic noise and the heartbeats of a couple of pulsars. Everyone's wristcoms appeared equally spiritless.

Mira slept on fidgetily. The sour stench of vomit wafted occasionally through the bridge; her condition had only worsened lately, her stomach permitting in only occasional sips of water.

At some point, the door to the cockpit slid quietly open. Buzz stepped through, peeling off a pair of insulated gloves from his hands, soon thereafter followed by Booster with a toolbox in the crook of one arm.

"Well..." the tired captain puffed, plonking down into his seat. "I fear we won't be blasting off to infinity and beyond in a while. The fusion matrix has busted, turbines four and five have molten down into shapeless clods, not to mention scores of other hardships like the battered hull... No life-threatening air leakages, though; the minor tears we at least were able to repair."

"The escape pod works," Booster added, "But...like we already talked back there, that won't bring us very far, unless we...uh...put ourselves into emergency hypersleep or something."

"Let's exclude that 'option' for now, and consider how we can depart this doggoned ditch of utter desolation too miserable for even worshippers of all things dark and doom-riddled like Zurg to use as nothing but a spare refuse dump! Craters."

Outside, the cold, soulless eyes of the stars stared down at the four stranded Rangers. A heavy silence fell into the sick-smelling room for a moment that felt all too stretched and funereal. The emergency lantern set on the floor flickered ominously, as if about to give up the ghost.

"Cheerful and cozy, isn't it? Like the birthday party of Mr. Undead Teddybear Lumpykins and his carnivorous zombie bunnies in that new Tam Brute-On film, only with less flying intestines and nails-on-blackboard music," XR harrumphed.

"One more of those highly inconsiderate interpellations and I shall strip you off your rank!" Buzz snarled, suddenly on his feet, his huge hands balled into trembling fists. "Look at us! We have a Ranger down, neither means nor materials to fix this deuced wreck of a ship, the food storages will soon be as empty as the skulls of Zurg's hornets—thanks to the bottomless appetite of certain unnamed crewmembers—and..."

Just as fast, his abrupt tirade abated down to a pathetic dribble of half-whispered apologies, as he spotted the owlish gazes of both XR and Booster. Despite still unable to focus properly, Mira listlessly opened her eyes, quite as baffled by this peculiar outburst as the others.

The captain massaged his temples and pinched the bridge of his nose. "Uh...I don't...I don't know what got into me...or perhaps I do. I haven't felt...well, felt the presence of death so close for years. Truly, Mira wasn't the only one hearing the approaching, chilly knelling of funeral bells out there. That blue void... Just the mere reminder of it somehow grates my nerves. I can't explain it. I keep thinking there's something I should recall or do, but...something's muddling my mentation big time. Uh...I can't even find the right words to express myself, can I? And now _this_ on top of everything, with Zurg out there plotting his...ah...well, the usual."

Glumly, he plopped back down, and regarded his open palms and the thin lines furrowing the skin for a twinkling. It truly seemed that something had torn asunder his usual haughty tenacity, as even ranting about Zurg's everlasting nefariousness brought no satisfaction.

A small sigh lammed from his lips, and he turned to Mira.

"How are you feeling? Can you perhaps manage a chocolate bar yet?"

"Uh...no. No, definitely not yet. Maybe soon, but not...soon-soon. Ufffgh-"

She slunk back against the pillow from the previous half-sitting position, one sweaty and sapless hand pressed over her forehead.

"Uh...it's nothing more than the usual," she whispered after Buzz and Booster's alarmed yelps. "Honestly. I just sh-should keep my eyes shut. There's...uh...some ongoing feud between my guts and this new, dashing double-vision, and I wouldn't want to soil our furnishings any further. Y'know, my nose _is_ working fine and all."

Booster gave a nervous chuckle, but soon adopted the erstwhile air of seriousness. "Uh...XR? Any luck with those coordinates? I mean...shouldn't there have been something by now? Unless we got dropped into that alternative university...um...thingummy."

"Nope," the robot answered. "I'm starting to wonder if we're sitting bottled in-between a handful of some dark, mysterious objects that block most incoming radio frequencies. Wouldn't be the first time, and ol' 42 has unquestionably taken a fancy on _some_ body's gravity. With our luck, it'll be a black hole."

Buzz thumbed the cleft on his chin, and absently gazed at the exit leading further into the intestines of the vessel.

"We...may have to resort to the escape pod, if we want to find our way _anywhere_. It's just that oxygen will soon become a rare commodity in that cramped little jar, and I'm not risking such a gamble before Mira has recovered a bit. I...uaah..."

The sentence widened out into one massive yawn, which Buzz in vain attempted to stifle. On the other hand, Booster had been oscitating so hugely ever since the return that a small bear might have crawled into his mouth to hibernate comfortably.

Outside, the blackness pressed into the lonely star cruiser. Space never obeyed the rules of those home-sweet-home planets uncountable light years away, never painted the skies with the blazing oranges of gloaming, never nudged at the casual traveler towards the solace of a soft bed after a long, laborious day. Noon and midnight, morning and evening—meaningless balderdash in this never-ending murkiness.

"Maybe the Big Guy has the right idea," XR inclined his head towards the intermittently gaping cavern of a Jo-Adian gorge. "You did spend half an eternity in 42's belly, after all. Besides, Mira might really appreciate some peace and quiet. Note my empathetic concern for my fellow crewmembers and the entire lack of sarcasm in this suggestion."

The corners of Buzz's mouth twitched downwards, but he left the remark astride the tip of his tongue crawl back into the mental box of ill-tempered interjections. With that, Team Lightyear ultimately decided to tuck themselves in. After a couple of minutes of plumping gel cushions and shuffling with blankets, Buzz dimmed down the lantern, and curled up into his seat.

Even later, perhaps after an hour or so of bootless listening of radio frequencies, XR's head nodded, and his eye sensors eclipsed in this deadening desolation seemingly devoid of life.

* * *

Mira's delirious mind wandered through the halls of pandemonium itself. Occasionally she found herself surrounded by short snatches of familiar nightmares that had followed her since childhood. Glimpses of her bygone mother sprawling immovable on a tousled bed, dark blood drip-drip-dripping on the floor with treacly slowness... Her teenage self staggering through heavy jungle growth, exhausted and panting, something unnamed on pursuit and ready to jump upon her from the shadow-mottled depths of green on the moment her strength gave in... A baby doll she had loathed as a four-year-old—complete with glassy, creepily staring eyes and lips all too crimson to fit its sallow complexion and puffy infant's cheeks—suddenly turning its head towards her with a haunting creak and blinking those unfocused, bulging orbs... Sporadically she found herself back in the blue nothingness, drifting through distances untold, the undulating pattern of lozenges always winding through the horizon, somehow virtually touchable and infinitely remote at the same time...

Now, the void had once again drawn her into its dismal cuddle. It, however, seemed that this journey had lasted much longer than before...and with this, coldness so piercing it felt like being skinned alive had followed, suddenly flooding over her in the manner of a raging tide. Saturated by this dreadful, stinging pain, she attempted to scream, tried to exorcise the raw agony through her throat, but no sound came out.

And...she could not breathe. She could not breathe, no matter how much she endeavored gasping and wheezing. The primeval frost had iced over her lungs and mouth; white hoar was creeping up her cheeks and crawling into her nose, reaching her eyes while the pain intensified into an almost solid being strangling her-

Mira flung herself up. Her insanely pounding heart seemed ready to explode through the ribcage, while hefty beads of sweat rolled down her face, tasting salty on her lips. It took a while to ease the ragged inhales and reassure the twanging lump it truly did not need to flee the trusty hostess of over a quarter of a century. When her mind had finally cleared a teensy bit, she sought for the familiar contours of the ship's console in the semi-gloom, the texture of the seat's padding...

...and found none. Dumbfounded, the princess stared down at the worn, almost black planks underneath her, beyond which curved...

She inhaled sharply, and almost jumped in fright at the resonance of her own voice. Obviously everything sounded unnaturally loud after the life-sucking void.

So...she was not in 42. This...she...she had to be still dreaming, hadn't she? The very least, she possessed no memory of ever stepping into this massive vault of burgundy-hued, slightly glowing stone. The proportions sang of a design intended for beings vastly past her rather slight figure: pillars as thick as old oaks tickled at the roots of bridge-like arches high above, and a chair the size of a weighty boulder sat against one wall constructed of blocks broad enough to encompass the floor of a regular Tangean room.

Was...was this really a dream? Frowning, she let her gaze sweep across the peculiar space. Where was everyone else? Certainly nobody or nothing had removed her Ranger's uniform, and...

She touched gingerly the back of her head. Yes, a throbbing lump gibbous'ed there, and the telltale headache jumped up and down in her attic, although not as ferociously as before. Her mind also felt oddly pellucid compared to the previous sensation of carrying a feather pillow inside her skull instead of brains. Neither did the world lurch back and forth, besides remaining clearly drawn without blurry edges or doubled lines.

Encouraged by the rejuvenation—even if still utterly befuddled by the abrupt emergence into this realm of gigantic dimensions—she started tottering across the vault. A figment of not, well...she could not just stick fast to this spot like some lump of old chewing gum. She had to find her teammates, or at least...urgh, yet _another_ exit. The past few hours, or whatever time units they had been, had embraced nothing but peculiar spaces without plausible getaways and then suddenly finding yourself in some wholly different existence.

A dream inside another dream, perhaps? Or maybe even a meta-meta-dream, the utmost reality reigning somewhere within that collapsing hyperspace tunnel? She might well have lost consciousness sometime soon after crashing into the windscreen, and the hapless star cruiser would still tumble down the warp, her bruised body rolling to and fro somewhere inside...

Yet again...something in this weird, castle-ish construction felt so utterly realistic. The way her steps echoed, the intricate carvings upon the stone—The likes of which she had never faced before: many-threaded knots weaving around snarling, many-toothed beasts and humanoid figures holding some kinds of...sticks? Spears? Swords?—the mellow, red light spilling from...

She halted, and stood stock still for a brief while, ears pricked and senses as alert as possible. This place _was_ inhabited: she could distinguish faint noises issuing from the direction of the light: creaks, clinks of metal, and...more than one person speaking.

Well. A Space Ranger never sprang headlong into the arms of a host unknown, especially if crewless and equipped with a dull headache. She slid nigher to the wall on the tips of her toes, ready to ghost—only to discover that neither the stone nor the wood beneath yielded to her touch.

Well, well. Ghostproof, huh? That was surprising, as even Zurg's palace lacked this safety measure. Optionally some Grounders might lurk nearby, but...how likely would that be? They certainly never swelled to sizes fulfilling the purpose of this architecture, no matter how bigheaded in the literal meaning of the expression.

So, she might as well resort to the jolly ol' sidling tactics. Buzz had become the legend of his era without so-called superpowers, so she probably shouldn't always rely too much on the gifts of Tangean genetics.

The vault terminated into an arched doorway and a curving corridor beyond, from the other end of which the brighter light and sounds spilled forth. The dancing shadows hinted at the presence of an open fire. As quietly as possible, Mira slipped into the tunnel and stole along the right-hand side towards the brightness. Mountainous, hairy pelts hung on the walls on either side, in-between round, brightly painted disks she recognized as archaic hand-combat shields. Highly intrigued, she might have lingered there and studied the carefully crafted patterns further, but the desire to behold living beings after all those immeasurable stretches of emptiness allured her more.

Step after step, the noises gathered shape, but never true meaning. Two-three throaty, rumbling voices spoke an unfamiliar language, a ponderous gibberish laden with wide vowels and words so long and varied she scarcely could separate a full sentence from another. It took some time to negotiate the corridor on tiptoe, yet ultimately she reached the threshold of the hall beyond. There, by the doorframe, she had to stifle a gasp by clapping one hand firmly over her mouth.

Indeed, the tides of late had conveyed many sights inducing wonderment and fear, but this stood out as a unique specimen among the rest. Two monumental creatures...no, humanoids, Mira corrected herself, sat at the end of a long table, while an open firepit set in the floor nearby blazed snugly. She, however, could not be certain whether all the light actually emerged from the hole—the wildly red hair and beard of the outsized man closest to the entrance snaked and rippled like untamed flames. Funnily enough, his pale complexion and proportions almost matched those of Buzz, safe for longer, thicker legs, and the crucial aspect of being about fifteen feet tall. The second of his kin, white-haired and more ravaged in his humanlike face, sported a slimmer frame and an expression ready to curdle a cubic mile of fresh milk. In one hand, he held a horn brimful of foaming brew, while the other jabbed animatedly at something laid open on the table. Due to the awkward angle, Mira never caught the sight of it, but became almost mesmerized by the continuous up-and-down motion of his bristling brows set upon sockets utterly lacking eyeballs and instead aglow with a fierce, bluish flame.

Mira, a midget cowering in the shadow of the doorframe, gave an involuntary squeak when the old-timer slammed a fist the size of a gravestone against the table with a floor-shaking _thwump_. The visage of the redhead abruptly swung towards her, and her gaze locked with his deep crimson flare of a scowl.

Stiff as a frozen turnip, she dared not even blink, lest the unearthly being might attack with a means quite as eldritch as himself—like perhaps plunging a hand into those tempestuous curls and hurling a fiery hairball at her. Nonetheless, the man only measured her loftily up and down for a moment, after which pinpoints of bright orange flared up in the depths of his equally eyeball-less sockets.

Then...a rollercoaster ride of fleeting images pursued, imprisoning the Tangean into its stomach-churning pitches and plunges. These, however, were far more minatory than the early, disjointed fragments of familiar nightmares. One could deal with something that had tagged along with one's nightly wanderings for decades. One could _not_ easily welcome a torrent of visions belonging to the more or less twisted mental canyons of a cult-status horror novelist.

Yet on it went...

She plummeted down a steep chasm with appalling speed, down towards a blue-lit cavern where something lay shackled on a great stone slab. A flashing glimpse of a countenance dreadfully burned, bits of bone peeking out from between slivers of blackened skin and muscle. The earth around shook and grumbled, and a raw, inhuman screech issued from the creature's gaping maw...which soon mingled with the almost ethereal sound of a masterly plucked, harp-like instrument cradled in the lap of an elderly, yet powerful man. The princess had no chance to register his bearings with greater detail, only that he sat atop a high pile of stones and resembled the two outsized characters by the hearth.

Again, the view flickered, dissolving into gray mist, out of which arose a slavering, growling mountain of briary hair. Sierras of teeth that would have satisfied the kinks of even the most extreme adventure-mountaineers filled its maw, and the reek of its rank breath, stinking of ancient rot and corruption, made her gag.

And then...the royal palace of Tangea weltering in a sea of snow, the storm-mantled sky spitting down fist-sized lumps of ice, raging winds tearing at the tops of the few dead trees still climbing above the surface... Capital Planet in an equal state of wintry turmoil, frozen bodies littering the Plaza of Alliance...

The universe reeled again, jostling the now almost dizzy Mira into a leaden, drizzly seascape. An army of colossal longships with towering prows hovered just above the frothing waves, while the vessel at the very front rose lurching into the air, its weirdly scaly broadside gleaming in the waxen light of storm lamps... A quirkily draped figure galloped across a glassy plane, pursued by...no, she could not make sense of the host as the vista imploded again, shoving a burning creature wielding a whip of fire onto the stage, now a foully grinning human man with long, black hair and a beard to match; those aged, keen features hauntingly familiar... The frost-bound Capital Planet again, its sun diminishing and turning bloody maroon...her father prostrating in a drift, inert and staring upwards with glassy, unseeing eyes...

No. No, no, no! NO, NO! She could not...she could not endure this any longer. The swerving ride awash with doom and fetidness had become simply too much. The taste of bile filled her mouth, the suddenly returned coldness was poisoning her blood; something hissed and scraped behind the ill-omened visions... With a huge effort, she tore her mind out of the chaos, forced it to barricade the images behind great gates of mental iron, compelled herself to recall that she truly lay injured somewhere, and was only dreaming.

Utter blackness enclosed her then, the screeches of beasts and wails of freezing aliens fading away. The scratching sound yet persisted, but that she _could_ tolerate. The icy temperatures vanished into the newly emerged cozy, semi-dark warmth, and she felt something reassuring beneath her cheek.

The soft synthfiber fabric of the copilot seat cushion.

Mira almost wept with relief, when the somnolent cockpit of 42 swam into view. Every shape stood out slightly blurred or twofold, but she could not care less. She was still alive, alive! A giant castle had not swallowed her teammates, the universe had not turned into a raging winter non-wonderland, and...even the scraping had ceased.

Buzz and Booster snored soundly in their seats, and XR...well. Craters.

One would have thought robots stayed perky 25/8, but that little weirdo and his crooked circuits had certainly mastered every downside of organic sentience, hadn't he? An incurably sexist attitude. Bottomless resources for sardonic wisecracking. _Sleeping on duty._

Nevertheless, flaws made one _humane_...in a manner of speaking. Perhaps the crooks and loops in the grand design also powered the bits concerned over compassion and...such whatsits.

The Ranger propped herself up on her elbows. Her monotonously pounding headache apparently still mingled with her reasoning, tarrying it and setting booby traps on the way, so that the thread of thought frequently got dropped down somewhere into the deep-red chasms of the spinal cord, and took its time to negotiate out.

This was probably the reason why she had not instantly perceived that something out-of-place still irritated her ears, something not exactly belonging to the soundscape of a stagnant ship.

What was that... A faint scritch-scratch sound?

Where was it coming from? It...

Only then did Mira raise her blurry gaze from the shadow-whelmed floor, and gawked, suddenly stumped, at the galley door. Slowly, meticulously, it was being pushed open.

Those dark, long fingers flexing and stealthily creeping in certainly did not belong to anyone—or anything—she could recognize.

* * *

Please review!


	5. Chapter 5

AN: I still haven't had time to read any newer stories on this site, so my apologies for any coincidental similarities.

P.A.W.07: Thanks for your review, glad you've liked the story. :-) Yes, my writing tends to progress slowly, which may have been influenced by my strong liking of brick-sized, long-winded fantasy epics. However, I feel it also helps to get better inside the minds of the characters. Furthermore, the idea I have is quite complex and thus requires some explaining and time to unravel. ;-) The story will contain darker chapters, even though it is humor-oriented (or sarcasm-oriented) in a fashion.

* * *

CHAPTER V

In her mind, Mira cursed at her sluggishness to react. She gave a cry of warning, and reached out for her laser-equipped gauntlet lying on the floor. At this point, the lurker abandoned all stealth, kicked the door wide open, and reached out for two, long guns holstered at its hips. Unfortunately, their mercilessly gaping barrels were already pointing straight at the team, even as the three remaining Rangers blinked groggily in the half-light, stirring in their seat-beds. A second's murmur of whats and whys washed through the previously dozy cockpit, before the situation could be fully assessed.

Pallid, bluish light now glowed in the doorway, mingling with the sallow green of the emergency lantern. Deep, dancing shadows wove their webs in every nook and cranny even slightly out of the reach of the sickly pool of illumination, creating an atmosphere all too reminiscent of the notorious, sordidly lit back alleys of Trade World, where any patch of darkness might turn out to be a delirious dopefiend ready to slit any person's throat for the sake of a couple of coins.

The figure towering by the threshold, however, certainly did not appear like any shaky-fisted junkie muttering incoherently about plumbers that discovered magical mushrooms inside lengths of solid brick wall. One ghastly instant Mira believed beholding Zurg himself, as the top of the creature's head brushed the same heights as the horns of the imperial helmet, while a voluminous, billowing garment of some quality draped its body. No matter how much of a barmy old codger he might be, the emperor still wielded formidable hand-combat skills and agility rivaling that of Buzz, not to mention his great arsenal of nanotech weapons.

On closer inspection, the alien turned out to sport a far more sinewy frame, and not precisely the kinds of shoulders over which one might easily sling two stunned cows. An odd assortment of clothing and instruments ready to sow death covered its body: A deplorably antiquated space suit patched and repaired many times over with more modern parts that clashed peculiarly with the rather garish, over-ornamented original design; several wide belts pregnant with spare bullets, bulging pouches, and an assortment of knives; a mirror helmet which, shape-wise, would have been more at home in the goldfish section of a pet shop, and high boots complete with spurs. An ankle-length trench coat overlaid all this, and a wide-brimmed stetson had been rammed on top of the helmet. Add a bucketful of huge, tawdry buckles, straps, bandanas, and other gimcracks ripped straight off from cheap post-nuclear space operas, and one had quite well nailed down the intruder's appearance.

A certain shade of ludicrousness might have caked the moment, had this one-man army not so vociferously bristled with guns. Now, a frequency-scrambled voice snapped somewhere from behind the visor, demanding Mira and anyone else around to drop their weapons and reach for the skies.

Buzz, again aglow with his usual Ranger stamina, snorted, "You won't get away with this, no matter what your diabolical intent, space buccaneer! Threatening a member of the Universe Protection Unit with a-"

"Scrap th' pomp an' drama, buster. I ne'er thought anyone'd actually say summat like _ye ain't gonna ge' away wi' dis_ in real life; such a beef-headed cliché, that is. Besides, I can agnise a Space Ranger star cruiser whe' I spot un," the stranger spat with a thick, twangy accent, jabbing the general direction of Lightyear with one of his pistols. "Yer colors o' office are as unnoticeable as a peacock sittin' among piglets, ain't 'ey? Speakin' o' which, wha' in holy tarnation is to guarantee ye jus' haven't hijacked this star-wagon fro' sum hapless sods an' kicked out th' lot to die somewhere inne Kuiper Belt?"

Buzz and Mira glanced at one another, arms still in the air. This did not sound like the typical nefarious villain talk, but then again, one never knew about homicidal madmen. One moment they might be jabbering away about the graceful beauty of night-moths waltzing beneath the silver kisses of the full moon with Shakespearian poetic finesse, and the following second tear out a person's intestines with the gutting hook they had hidden behind their back all this while.

The captain clearly took this disbelief of his Ranger-ness as a personal offence, but refrained from tossing back an angry retort. One spark of hope had glimmered in the intruder's words: the mentioning of a place name. This clinking collection of appurtenance probably looted from some museum of space traveling clearly knew _where they were_.

However, they would have to overpower this fellow somehow... Buzz's eyes narrowed slightly in concentration. Perhaps he could concoct some crafty artifice ex tempore, here and now. The experience of many decades told that allowing the menacing party to gloat or blather away at its leisure usually bought the necessary time for a successful counter-action. Hmm...the alien obviously acted solo—a daring but stupid act. Mira's aid was out of the question, but if he could signal XR about that certain maneuver that allowed fast disarming...

The stranger, nonetheless, cut his attempt short with a sharp gesture.

"Ye, astro-shortie! Yeah, ye wi' th' over-swollen dimple-chin; stop hatchin' whate'er scurvy tricks ye ha' in mind. I savvy tha' look; yer tryin' to make this Wall-E over yere do summat other than sit nice an' quiet like a pine snag. Un budgin', an' I can pledge it'll soon resemble un o' those compressed cubes o' trash they spit oot."

The robot snorted audibly. "Hey, I'm a sentient, _sensitive being_, and certainly-"

"Well, well, it talks. Fancy tha'. What'll 'em clever industrials think o' next, wastepaper baskets tha' sing yeh a-merry happy Yuletide? Potties tha' make _amusin' sounds_ while yer umpf'ing out yer doodah? Now, shut yer trap."

Mira, who had followed the pointless-sounding argument together with her irritating headache, had had quite enough. "_What _is it exactly that you want? You're busy pointing guns at us, but precisely _why_?"

She glared up at the doubled bulk of the foe. Bloody craters, no wonder she had mistaken it for Zurg for a twinkling, as it must have stood eight feet tall. From where did all these weirdly attired, gigantic interlopers suddenly crop up? Of course, apart from the humanoid shape, this specimen resembled the creatures of her nightmare just as much as aardvarks did apricots, but even so.

The stranger gave a mirthless chuckle, the visor glinting menacingly in the bloodless light. "_Wha' do I want?_ Well, tha' depends onne outcome o' our next step, wonnit?"

Buzz was about to protest, when another figure swam into view from beyond the doorway. This abrupt emergence of extra forces regrettably shattered the teeny-tiny idea about a ruse involving an enemy-squishing Booster. On top of that arrived the realization that he was not dealing with some common, toffee-brained thugs here, but individuals clever enough to recognize stealthy defense strategies.

The second intruder, quite clearly a female, loped into the cockpit. Similarly clad as her companion, she posed almost a foot taller than Lightyear, no hint of a face visible beyond the bronze-hued mirror visor. Twin pistols, of the same insanely hefty, gaudily patterned make, stood firmly also in the grasp of her hands.

"See whatcha can dig outta tha' ground," the first stranger noted with a hint of boredom in its voice, and leaned casually against the doorframe. The grip on the guns never relaxed, though; constant vigilance hid somewhere underneath that post-nuclear Christmas tree of a space suit.

Sans so much as a single syllable, the female sheathed her pistols, strode to the nearest team member—Booster—and began extracting the contents of his utility belt. A rain of chocolate bars, keys, coins, and other miscellaneous pocket dwellers fell into one vast heap onto the floor.

"Scummy, sleazy marauders; that's what you are! You're in no luck if you think we carry prized treasures about our persons," Buzz harrumphed.

"Callin' us all 'em high-falutin' names won't help yer situation no-how," the stranger answered with a bored tone, and addressed its companion again. "Does th' great big stumblebum carry anyfin' o' interest?"

The female dropped down a pair of pillowcase-sized spare socks that exhaled a cloud of interestingly smelling vapors, and unfolded an accordion of ID cards. From her belt, she pulled out a brazen gimcrack reminiscent of an old-fashioned hairdryer, pressed the button jutting on the top, and started scanning the cards. The device clicked and snapped, while figures teemed across the little screen embedded near the handle. After a moment, she nodded, seemingly satisfied with the results.

"Hmh. Still ain't fully convinced," the first intruder yawned. "Check Sir Lightbeer an' his nobbish captain's livery o'er yon."

"Hah, so you _do_ know me!" Buzz barked stiffly. "Now look who's mocking whom! For your information, it's-"

"Shut it, snapperhead. Nope; ne'er hearn o' ye afore, leastways can't remember doin' so. An' I ain't sure I'll give a blazin' tarnation either. Just read yer nametag, albeit migh' be a tad o' a hard row to hoe in this measly light."

Buzz's next angry retort shriveled up on his palate, as the female reached him with two or three leaps of her long legs, and slid a hand into his pocket. In less than a second, his face had flushed redder than a bushel of rubies swimming in ketchup.

"Ah-uh...um...a little...privacy, ma'am?" he spluttered, cheeks shimmering, as deft fingers excavated various items from his belt pouches and the immediate surroundings.

The offender of his intimacy let out an impish snort-giggle through her nose, and chuckled with the same, thick, rather nasal accent that the doorway-skulker used, "Sweet mother o' Abraham Lincoln, this un's such a li'l unsalted tenderfoot, innit?" Cackling some more, she actually patted Buzz on the top of his hooded head. "I ain't reckonin' this lot'd be one o' ol' Dalton's, though. Ne'er met such a blushing boy among 'is rowdy-dow gringos. Haha."

Somewhere approximately a foot below her lofty height, the purple-jowled Captain wished he could borrow Mira's handy ghosting skills in order to sink through the floor and further into the nearest black hole. For his utmost horror, the prankish woman still didn't cease, but inspected his space suit with annoying, deliberate slowness, and eventually started pulling off some of the outermost parts. Only after when she had scanned his irises and the soles of his feet, compared the results to the data holoprinted on his deck of ID cards, and even dug out the microchip that granted intelligence to his wristcom and scrutinized the serials thereon with nerve-rending meticulousness, did she appear to be content.

"Well, 'ey are what they say: Space Rangers; lock, stock, and barrel. Ne'er would've thought I'd see such a raft o'em ridin' the prairies o' th' skies yereabouts." Shrugging, the woman turned back to Buzz, arms teasingly akimbo. A devilish grin very likely frolicked somewhere behind the visor. "Well, li'l feller, don't look so looed; ye just played th' handful o' aces ye had tucked up yer sleeve all this time! Now, blow yer nose an' put yer big ranny boots back on."

Next to the pilot seat, the person addressed stood statuesquely—that is, if some half-baked sculptor had, for some inexplicable reason, wanted to portray a partially undressed space hero wielding an expression reminiscent of that of a pimply, buck-toothed nerd who had just failed to get a partner to the prom for the fifteenth time in row—not daring lift his gaze from his bare toes. One could have fried a delicious bacon breakfast upon his shimmering forehead.

"Figures, ye can ne'er be too careful, lest ye wanna try breathin' through a windpipe wi' more holes tha' a broken sieve... A heap o' pardons 'bout this, but 'twas th' only road to certainty," the stranger in the doorway intoned with evident disappointment in its voice, as if it truly had preferred pulverizing the whole bridge. Then, for Team Lightyear's utmost surprise, the pistol duo was lowered. "Well, fetch th' huge lubber yere back his IDs. Reckon we oughta keep a li'l pow-wow afore we take our leave an' try re-trackin' th' ion trails."

"Ahem..." The robotic ranger waved a hand, fixing the woman with a wide and rather lecherous grin. "Aren't you going to search the rest of us? I assure you, I don't mind _at all_ if you rummage around in my-"

"Be silent, XR," Buzz snapped, slowly regaining his composure as he strapped and zipped on various space suit articles. "Would you mind justifying the reasons for this hostile assault on a team of Universe Protection Unit officers stranded in a patch of possibly uncharted space and in a severe state of distress? By all means, we ought to place you under arrest! Furthermore, you should remain cognizant that depraving an officer of his uniform represents a serious breach of-"

"Drop th' legal prattle, pardner," the stranger responded irritably. "Ain't got no time fer pleasantries. As I said, we oughta talk, an' keep yer lasers down. I still ain't cocksure 'bout all th'...details. Wha' business does such a swad of yer kind ha' in this Ol' Nick's arse anyhow? Usually un o' ye's a bloody crowd!"

With that, the intruder pushed a button on his helmet, and the visor slid up with a faint clickety-rattle. The long, narrow visage brooding beyond bore a prominent nose, a pair of sharp, calculating eyes, an outmoded handlebar moustache, and a grim expression. This, together with his oddly long limbs, emphasized the likeness to something suffering from random bouts of elasticity. He also clearly shared a species link with the captain: that particular skin tone combined with the body type had only ever been recorded among human beings or the very close genetic relatives of thereof. Only the height teetered near unnatural magnitudes—but then again, mutations did occur and Nature had a habit of resorting to peculiar tricks in isolated places.

Buzz was somewhat taken aback. Fine, his kin did inhabit many unusual corners of the galaxy, but to slam straight into one in the nucleus of sheer nothingness, a void that apparently even all common signaling systems circumvented...

He was just about to remark upon the very matter, when he was crudely interrupted by a jolt that knocked him over and slammed him heavily into the floor. A few sharp yells tore the air, followed by an ear-splitting _BANG-BLAM,_ and a brief, acrid pong of smoke. Then, a medley of clatter, more shouts, and a ferocious SLAM. The next thing Buzz knew, he was regarding the cockpit from the perspective of a squashed cricket. A long-shanked, feminine shape loomed over him, and slightly further beyond, a brace of pistols glinting ominously in the lantern light, their barrels well over half a meter long pointing towards the open exit.

"Blazes, sum slinks must've followed us in; jus' caught a glimpse o' un past yon door! 'Twas tinkerin' wi' a bloody blunderbuss, an' about to blast us into smithereens!" She bounced away from over Lightyear, veered about, and then accosted the team with an incisive, commanding note utterly devoid of the erstwhile playfulness. "Don't just hifer 'bout, we shoul' skedaddle a' once! We ain't safe yere!"

"Hey, it's forbidden to utilize firearms inside the ship! You could severely damage...and, craters, did you just _kill_- Hey, are you even listening?" Lightyear demanded, springing up from the non-heroic position of sprawling flat on the floor. The whiskered man had already snapped his visor shut, and was leaping over the threshold, the long trench coat flying behind him.

"No time! Ge' a wiggle on, ye dough-legs, or else we'll be food fer th' worms! Giddy-up!"

The captain took his word for it. In spite of his anger over the whole hubbub, it had dawned to him that the unflattering push had probably saved his patootie. Deuced desperados or not, the strangers probably shared the same tactical side with Team Lightyear, at least momentarily. Furthermore, thanks to a streak of luck, he had managed to gather up the bits and particulars of his uniform during the brief interval of calm just after the embarrassing inspection. Inwardly, he yet cursed at how dreadfully their guard had slackened merely because of a simple case of temporary isolation. Every officer ought to have reacted promptly to the attacks, not only the injured member and now this...uh...pants-breaching femme fatale.

He, nevertheless, uttered none of this aloud, but proceeded with evacuation orders. "Team; code 5-9-2, empty the ship, NOW! Booster, grab Mira; XR, be ready to cover us! We don't know what's out there!"

Helter-skelter, the small host tumbled out of the cockpit. Indeed, just behind the entrance, a black-mantled figure prostrated inert on the carpeting, dark fluid slowly pooling beneath it. With a groan, Buzz recognized the object dropped near the ex-person's lifeless hand: a bundle of wires and tubing, topped with a tiny screen crowded by rolling numbers. The built-in clock had probably enjoyed a bit too much Time during its many past lives, though, as the seconds hobbled down irregularly, often leaping over full decades without any warning whatsoever.

"Blast, we've got a bomb! Hurry, hurry; it might go off any moment now!"

The space cowboys had obviously sneaked in somehow through the airlock. Presently the inner gateway sat firmly sealed, but when the Captain attempted egress, the huge hatch would not budge.

"Jumping blazars; don't start acting up now..." he gritted his teeth, wrenching with all his might at the bull-headed lock wheel. And, behind the now profusely nervous Rangers, the besotted clock hiccupped down towards zero; down, down, down...

"This feller ha' an accomplice or two, leastways th' un who planted th' 'splosives," the girl snarled. "Must've tampered wi' th' mechanism, or just got it plain stuck afta 'e got gaited. Tha' other piece o' buzzard food's past questionin' now."

"Stand back; we'll have to cut it open! XR, tackle the other end! Prepare for air suction, in case the outer hatch isn't closed!"

Lightyear was about to strike an imposing door-sawing pose, when the male stranger pushed him firmly aside. From one of the pouches at his belt, he unearthed a lumpy cylinder, which he briskly attached to the ludicrously long rifle formerly slung across his back. It was hard to determine which person prided more over his impressive battle gear: Captain Lightyear or this malapert newcomer. No matter how many millennia's worth of sand trickled through the cosmic hourglass, the male members of certain species never grew bored to the testosterone-laden game of comparing the size and vehemence of their weapons with one another. With the help of a millimeter ruler and scales, if necessary.

With that, he pulled the trigger. Something bright green and faintly smoking gushed out of the barrel, splashed across the hatch, and in an instant began eating away the thick layer of metal. In a few moments, a raggedy, XR-sized hole glared in the middle, still widening as the acid sizzled away.

Moreover, the outer airlock indeed yawned wide open. Briefly, the air suction became too forceful for the escapers to remain on their feet any longer. A frantic scrabbling for handhold and jetpack activation began, and yet, _yet_ the opening did not seem large enough. Besides, what if someone accidentally hit the edge, the band of acid that surely would drill through the toughest of space suits, not to mention the tender flesh beneath...

"Get out, NOW! NOW!" someone screamed.

Time seemed to slow down.

Then, suddenly, the bomb's clock hippity-hopped past zero to minus two seconds, spotted its error, and embarrassedly looped back to feasible time units. A spark ignited the explosive somewhere inside its casing, and the world turned into a red blossom of extreme heat and flying debris.

* * *

A plain of alternately colored squares, stretching far, far into the horizon. Purple, and green so bright it shone almost luminous, the hues clashing dreadfully with one another. Statuesque shapes reached out towards the heavens, where two pairs of vast eyes shone, the other crimson and vehement, the other a placid, fathomless blue. The gods of the game, regarding intently at the slow progress of the scheme...

Emperor Zurg picked up a Brain Pod -shaped playing piece between thumb and forefinger, a rascally grin of the utmost glee spreading on his helmet-visage.

"Ha! A-ha! Hahahaha-haah-aaa! Now, smash that! Ha-ha! Jim-crackin'-dandy, break out of that cul-de-sac! Uhuhuhuh, endeavor eluding _that _entanglement-"

The insane grin, however, slid off his countenance like Peevean slug guano down a steep hillside, when another piece, carved into the likeness of a rather poppy-eyed Commander Nebula, was lifted up into the air, soared Zurgwards the length of the board, and landed neatly upon a green square, next to a tall piece capturing the semblance of the monarch himself. With an additional hop, it moved to the imperial rectangle, and capsized the hapless figurine, sending it rolling towards a cluster of diminutive grubs.

The real Zurg's clawed hand snatched it up midway through the journey. One could almost see thick, black smoke rising from the joint between the helmet and the neck guard of his space armor, as he, with clenched fists and stiff shoulders, labored to stifle the fiery tantrum roiling around his inners.

Finally, after few minutes, the adrenaline surge had considerably receded. He glared down at the impassive face of the opponent, shaking the fist where he still clutched at the piece, its tiny velvet cloak now utterly rumpled. When he spoke, his voice was surprisingly level, even if his chest still heaved with annoyance.

"Mark my words, Bölþornsson!I shall yet beat thee in the very end; during the past fifteen years, I have over and over again claimed the title of the Zhess Grandmaster of Zeta Quadrant, and I shall not be thwarted in this clash of brainpowers by some nugatory non-entity from the pits of-"

The burning, unblinking gaze of the wight flashed warningly. Very uncharacteristically, Zurg reeled again, a stupid simper replacing the surly grimace.

"Eaah...I mean, when and _if_ some nugatory non-entity ever dared challenge the mighty Evil Emperor Zurg! But obviously I see none such person in this room, so it was...merely...an example...umhumhum... Now, pardon me for my leave-taking, but I have other matters to attend to."

With that, he twirled about, his cloak billowing out in a boastful arch, and stomped away. When the windowless door to the gloomy cell of the well-guardian had slid securely shut, Zurg let all the cooped-up rage unravel silently. The sudden heat ray burst from his lenses vaporized a couple of pointless corridor ornaments before he was able to calm fractionally down.

That...that...GRARH! That outrageously insufferable fee-faw-fum, how dared it beat him in his favorite pastime over and over and over...ROH! Had he not, with his immeasurable intelligence, invented the whole blasted game? Therefore, the right to win as often as he craved ought to have been a plain axiom! Now this...this lame n00b pwned him every time, concurrently demanding courtesy and...and...

Hissing, he strode down one of Dreadnaught's many echoing corridors towards his throne room.

This was not the first occasion the thought about the mission's dangerousness and even impending futility had surfaced in his mind. Perhaps it might have been more sensible to chuck the arrogant wight into the nearest sun and dart back to cozy ol' Planet Z. As much as one was able to _dart_, that is, as even the quickest route thence required leastwise a fortnight and several hops between various hyperspace tunnels...

Thence..._thence_? Since when, _when_ had his brain begun composing sentences peppered with such obsoleteisms? Well, that was trivial to answer; the doggoned ghost's vainglorious verses were saturating his vocabulary with archaic odds and ends, words like _whale-road_, and _mead-hall, _and whatever blatherskite only the geeky Brain Pod in control of the Old Horse..._Old Norse_ translations properly understood, and yet, yet the blasted phantom himself _never_ bothered to speak properly! Always those cryptic snatches of poetry, no matter how trifling the matter. He'd probably concoct a fifteen-page lay full of þ's, and ð's—and ungraspable vowels like Ö with those stupid puny dots balanced precariously on top of them, ready to roll off and make one's tongue trip—only about the blowing of his nose.

"Ö" just about summarized his feelings right now. A supplementary grievance also pestered him: the wight had begun demanding more attention. Even if it preferred the shelter of shadows, it did not wish to _sleep_ any longer, but requested company, challenges, and..._riddles_. Which was exactly why Zurg had suggested Zhess, among others, a game requiring true wits and unerring strategies.

That had lead to a third problem. His captive had suddenly showed aptitude in levitating objects, wherewith he moved the pieces about, hinting about yet somnolent, unsung powers. This might prove a precarious turn of events, not to mention that he seemed to...well...just as abruptly cognize miscellanies nobody had ever entrusted him, like the partial layout of the ship, and, more hair-risingly, details about Zurg's identity not a single person in this universe ought to have known. The emperor suspected high-level telepathic capabilities, which was just as well, as he had himself studied the arts of shielding one's mind against external penetration. Somehow, _somehow_ the wight had yet succeeded in bypassing his defenses without a warning of any kind.

...Which brought the matter back to the wight's actual treasure troves of data. Oh the knowledge, the knowledge! Uuhhh...it made the brain cells of even the greatest evil genius—a.k.a. him—purr with pleasure, even if it might be quite outdated. If only,_ if only_ one did not have to dig in so deep during every single bloody questioning! The wight, nonetheless, infrequently granted a straight answer, and one was forced to cling to itty bitty nitty soupcons of minutiae, often rephrase the query more than thrice, and...graargh, only to be inundated beneath an avalanche of more of that pestiferous, polysemous poetry! Well, didn't that just pickle one's eggplants; the lexiphanic lout.

He snorted, while the entrance leading to the obscured space behind his throne slid open. Now...if that _other_ lout had decided to grace the zurgarrific throne room with his absence yet again... Grarrh, the manners of that conceited little twit these days! Of course...the concept of etiquette did not automatically belong to the repertoire of a person treading the paths of the dark side. Yet, that _still_ did not grant him rights to act like the second-in-command of Zeta Quadrant, failing to follow schedules, losing memos on purpose, and as often as not, faking sick days, while in truth having a horizontal tango with yet another flibbertigibbet with cold custard for brains.

Craters, that last excuse..._an inflammation of the distal hoof ganglion_... Well, this time Zurg had looked it up, and it only ever affected the fifth foot of the carnivorous arachnosheep found on a single island on Karn, besides being a genetic disease carried in the female chromosomes and thus non-transmittable. One'd need to perform some quite fascinating splicing on themselves in order to catch _that_.

The emperor almost collided with an assiduous grub vacuuming dust off from a set of glossy, velvet curtains hanging beyond the imperial keister-rest.

"Huh! Watch it, you sniveling stooge! Is Darkmatter here, or has he perchance failed yet again to appear due to some pish-posh like a snowstorm in hyperspace?" Zurg huffed, trying to kick away the nozzle of the vacuum cleaner now sucking on the hem of his robe.

"Ah-eh...yes, my Evil Emperor! I mean, he's here and _not_ absent! Uh...let me take care of that..."

Sweating slightly, the minion shut down the apparatus, and started pulling the garment out of the long tube. Due to some pesky obstruction, the fabric, however, would not come free. Not even when the now rather profusely perspiring grub dismantled the nozzle and tried to see whether he might be able to pull it out, now that bits of robe peeked out of the tube's other end. Luck, nonetheless, had decided to give the whole affair a rude hand gesture.

"Grarrh, I DON'T HAVE TIME FOR THIS IDIOCY!" Zurg roared now, similarly unable to unstick the piece of device from his costume. "_Always _something foils my evil entrees, ruins the sinister suspense! Now matter how arduously I plan and double-check particulars, there's always a malfunctioning red carpet bot, or somesuch nuisance, present when I gloriously land down before the dread-struck natives to claim the ownership of a planet I've decided to conquer, et cetera, et cetera! Don't even get me started on the case when a flock of local birds thought I was a nice resting place for the arriving night... NO, leave it! I reiterate: I DO NOT HAVE TIME FOR THIS!" he bellowed down to the luckless insect who still wrestled with the nozzle. "Now, scurry off to tell the pilots to prepare the ship for a hyperspace jump this instant! We're already behind the bloody docket."

So, with half a meter of vacuum cleaner nozzle hanging from the side of his trailing robe, he stomped over to his throne, the unwanted companion making a discordant clattering sound every time a step was taken.

The master of shoddy excuses indeed stood—or more like lounged—near the dais, staring nonchalantly into space. Everything in him radiated a kind of casual arrogance these days; the leisurely pose, the haughty little smirk on his face, even the angle of the glass of violet crystal, out of which he was occasionally sipping some smoking beverage—as if Zurg had given orders to serve refreshments. He had let his hair grow considerably, and not just that upon his head. The once clean-cut short crop had exploded into a wild, slightly dreadlocky bush, and a nigh-on constant stubble or even longer hairs shaded the sides of his jaw outside the goatee. The emperor had seen more elegance in the backside of a bedraggled crow, but perhaps that truly _was_ the purpose. Some kind of insufferable bout of fashion no doubt; soigné sophistication ostensibly _so_ belonged to the last century now.

Phth, whatever. He definitely wouldn't sink so low as to appear akin to some Tradeworldian gutter-cockroach and moreover _indulge in pride over it_.

The clankety-clonkety of Zurg's arrival finally attracted Warp's attention. He turned away from the space view still offering fantastically twinkling constellations and nebulae, instead of the deadpan stripes of hyperspace, and raised his brows so high they were in danger of disappearing into his flyaway hair.

"Uhh...whassup with th' new style?" he commented. "The...ah...eye patch, I assume, belongs to some new space pirate fad, but what's wi' th' dress ornament? Looks like a vacuum-"

"Silence!" Zurg snarled, sitting down and attempting to conceal the embarrassing accessory underneath a corner of the cloak. "I daresay I have my own temporary reasons for the temporary covering of my eye, which will be temporary. Redundant, but gets the idea across to contumelious vulgarists like certain present company. Now..." He tapped an irritated finger against the armrest, glaring down at Darkmatter. "Where in the seventeen cratery damnations have you been loitering? I've tried summoning you for who knows how many times, and always, _always_ you somehow worm your way out of duty! This accursed spinelessness shall end RIGHT NOW, or would you mayhaps prefer to discover yourself that a spine indeed still resides somewhere beneath those layers of chesty laxness and self-indulgence? HMMM?"

At this, Darkmatter flinched horribly, the smug grin fading from his face.

Zurg leaned back in his seat in evident gratification. "Now, now, o my mean, misbehaving myrmidon... As you've noticed, we've just jumped, and shall nay..._not_ be returning into the waiting arms of our dear, oh-so-convenient-to-grab-an-escape-pod-and-slink-away space for a couple of days. Hence, there shall be plenty of time to reflect on matters such as _why_ and _how_ you're going to accomplish your upcoming assignment exactly as planned, and on schedule. Presently, I shan't waste more of my precious jiffies on further lectures that merely bounce off your thick skull, Darkmatter. I'll leave rest of the brainwork to you, kenning..._knowing_ that some quite slickly spinning cogwheels do lurk beneath that surface sometimes harder than terillium carbonic alloy. Hereafter, we shall proceed to our...quest. Did you read my memo, or was it devoured by invisible gerbils again?"

Before the throne, the now quite nervous mercenary racked his memory, not presuming to meet the emperor's gaze. "Uuh...I was...ah...supposed to...fetch some sort o' key from some dingy hillbilly rock? Yes? I...uh...recall that the description of the assignment itself consisted only o' a few lines, and ya hadn't given any...coordinates."

"Glad to see that your memory isn't affected by this inflammation of the distal hoof ganglion any longer," Zurg snorted. "But, basically, yes. I kept it succinct, because communication channels outside my realm can never be fully trusted these days. Variously shaped hearing organs and encryption-cracking computers tippytoe-prowling everywhere, Star Command spies sleuthing on whispered conversations exchanged in heretofore safe pubs... Anyhoo...we're sleigh-riding towards a place simply known as Solar System, quite near Proxima Centauri. Alas, most uninventive and plebeian, but there you are. Also infuriatingly iterative, as I barely arrived back thence. Could've saved a precious month or two, had I known our following target would lay concealed there also. Ah well, it's futile to snivel over spilled prune juice right now."

Then, he steepled his hands according to the fashion of guileful overlords all around the multiverse, and, oddly enough, grinned knavishly. "I might venture to guess that you're so utterly fed up with these ludicrous plot bunnies of late that you're _purposefully_ shilly-shallying and skiving off, hmm? Perhaps deeming that I've grown too old and daft to hatch up a reasonable world domination scheme outside ridiculous bibble-babble about five-dimensional reverse bees and alike? Maybe even considering your supreme lord too infirm and senile to fight back, should Star Command finally launch a full assault on Zeta Quadrant? Eh?"

Darkmatter appeared dumbstruck. It was almost as if Zurg had just opened a large window straight into his mental imagery and glimpsed him naked as his name-day, in the middle of something too embarrassing to string into words. Awkwardly, he raised one hand to fiddle with the blue-black hairs of his overgrown goatee.

"Eh...so those bees...uh...but ya appointed me to install th' time-traveling hives an' everything, an'... But now you're claiming tha'..."

"Ahahah huaahhahahahah gruaaah, ahahaha, it worked, it worked!" the emperor shrieked with mirth, suddenly rolling in his seat, and pointing at the even more perplexed Warp with a shaking finger. "Uuhhuhuhh, huahhaahahHAAHAHUUH HIIHAA RUHAHAHAHAH, oh, I'll wet myself! Even YOU were so utterly fooled! What a hoot! This is priceless! HAHAHAHAHAH! Ahhahaahaah, I _so_ love it when Lightwit and his consortium of morons are chasing false leads, but that even_ you _thought I was dead serious! Uuuhuhuhuuh...ahem..." Zurg braced himself, turning soberer again, even if the corners of the helmet grille still twitched. "You may have guessed during the lapsed two seconds that you've been a pawn in a grand game of stratagems, Darkmatter. Unfortunate, but necessary. Behold, for Star Command now suspects the very same as you: that I have entered the dusk of my heydays, that the ol' bucket-head verily is too old and bucket-headed to pose a grim threat to the safety of the Galactic Alliance. I do have my sources, and even some of Lightyear's closest underlings think along these very lines. Hrrhmhh...in very sooth, perhaps ol' Buzzy Boy has swallowed the lies also; I heard his team headed off to inspect some piddling Star Command office on the other side of the galaxy. Ah, so typical of that low-browed apeling; no creativity whatsoever. If it isn't about fighting eeeevil, then he's getting his kicks from the most boring routines the universe can muster."

Warp hardly heard the last few lines. Instead, he mouthed for a few seconds like a fish on dry land, shaking his head with disbelief and anger, before being able to speak coherently again.

"WHAT? _WHAT?_ I'm...I'm your right-hand man an'...an'..._WHAT?_ Cratery blazars, _now_ you're tellin' me I've been just some bloody plaything, tossed about by-"

"Oh, shush, you nitwit." Zurg waved an idle hand. "Where's your sense of humor? I haven't had so much nefarious fun for years and years and years! I was able to dump all the most harebrained plots the lads down in the Department of Evil Scheming had ever come up with upon the Alliance idiots and watch them run amok! Hmh...let's see..." Highly amused, he began counting with his fingers. "Among others, flesh-eating cauliflowers; turning water into marshmallow, so that nations would die of thirst; mind-controlled lab rats that spy on the Alliance scientists; harnessing the power of static electricity from cats into a deathly ray by kidnapping thousands of yowling furballs, with the added bonus of beholding all those sad, tear-streaked faces of the former owners crying over their lost pets..._and_ that mothball dissolvent flop—so utterly bananas it's probably my favorite. In the meanwhile, I have managed to pursue objectives of true importance without the constant hindrance of Lightyear buzzing about. Rwahahahah, it's been like the most thrilling Reality TV show ever, far more entertaining than _The Amazing Raisin_ or _Surfeiter_ or whatever other rubbish they're airing these days... However, as Nana Zurg used to say, too much sugar is never good for one's tummy. Hence the merriment cannot last, say, to infinity and beyond. Ah well...might as well fill you in on what you've missed during the past three years, as I require all the help I can get in this weighty endeavor..."

"Three years? _THREE YEARS?_ I mean..."

The emperor stood up and silenced the thunderstruck alien with a gesture. Therewith, he ordered the nearest grub to fetch some grub and more drinks, completely forgetting his quondam sourness over refreshments offered without his knowledge. Cloak swinging, he descended the little stairway connecting the dais and the bridge, and motioned towards one of the doors leading to, among others, one of the vessel's briefing rooms.

"Now, don't be such a dour little spoilsport, Darkmatter. It's been so much fun for the whole evil family! Beyond and above everything, I'm still riding the summit of my vigor, and, if all the right pieces fit snugly together in this great jigsaw puzzle of mysteries, shall linger in this exuberance of power perhaps for _centuries_ yet, naturally not forgetting my loyal minions."

Somewhere in the folds of his voluminous robes, Zurg held his fingers crossed. Furthermore, beneath all the sinister jolliness and the jubilant grin, a nerve ticked in the side of his neck, while nervous sweat glued his hair to the helmet's insulator padding. Well, he could hardly step back now, could he?

* * *

While the emperor had promised to keep the tale pithy and strictly to the point, the men still found that the numbers on the clock display had leaped ominous quantities, every time either one managed to steal a glimpse at it. On the other hand, someone of Zurg's ilk could never truly reflect on anything without miles and miles of analytical detours, gloating, and miscellaneous rambling spiced with cackling and the bashing of notable Alliance figures.

It all had apparently started when Zurg had been but a wee evil genius, listening to the bedtime stories of Nana Zurg, his imagination spinning with fascinating vistas of all those realms he could conquer when he grew up. Darkmatter could not fathom whether this grandmother figure existed as a mere figment in the monarch's mind, or not. Even if the latter held true, the decades must have quite heavily gilded or otherwise altered the memory of the alleged person in that bottomless bog of twisted, tangled, chaotic designs that perverted more or less every idea unfortunate enough to sink in. Present Emperor Zurg with any mundane, ever-so-slightly boring subject like the methods of accounting, and the following week he'd likely hand you a new, shiny tablet 'puter studded with little horns and claws, complete with an accounting application that gave the user tips on how to fake records with the impressive array of pre-programmed faulty equations.

While the emperor blathered on, a holographic projector upon the table displayed maps, images of scrolls scribbled with spidery writing, and what appeared to be weathered and partially cracked stone reliefs.

"...And then sometimes she, as I lay thrilled beneath the blankets, hugging my ickly tiny purple zombie bunny plushie, spun spooky stories about the frost-bound, winter-dark home world of her far-off ancestors, their names and likenesses now sunken into the gray mists of oblivion. Well...in normal circumstances I wouldn't care a flying rhinoceros's tail about such hocus-pocus jiggery-pokery concocted to lure squalling brats into bed, but..." Zurg gazed into the shadows of the ceiling, absently twiddling with a corndog and trying to stuff it into his mouth through the grille, succeeding in only smearing a part of his helmet with fat. "Well...later, as I trudged through the academy years, I kept bumping into certain character and place names over and over again, and gradually grew convinced that these silly, childish tales might actually stand on the shoulders of a truth of some kind..."

Mentally, Darkmatter rolled his eyes. The image of Emperor Zurg—swishing robes and an ion blaster and all—wandering about the dingy corridors of some university, a stack of books tucked under one arm, seemed quite as plausible as a frying pan made of ice. On the other hand, who knew whether he'd precisely been _an emperor_ somewhere back in the dawn of dinosaurs? Didn't he often, during his endless monologuing, blab something about overlording the Zeta Quadrant as a self-proclaimed sovereign? Well, Warp did know from experience that the half-mad ol' coot was not the deranged experiment of some artificial intelligence lab, so perhaps he indeed had spent a couple of years as an academical rat. Even so, hard to believe...

"Anyhow...a couple of years back I bumped into a hoard of some quite remarkable evidence, evidence that ultimately drove my curiosity to seek out for more details about these..._powerful entitie_s those la-di-da, grandiose legends narrated about. Obviously I deemed they'd still wade deep in undiluted exaggeration, but...well. The more some of my minions and I delved into these old manuscripts and suchlike, the more I became assured of their...how should I put it...authenticity."

At this, a sour taste filled Warp's mouth. There was something about the word _entities _that hurtled a wriggly chill down his spine. Robot vampires more sinister and intelligent than their creator? Fine. Carnivorous eggplants, crazy aliens with a dissection mania, gas that sent one back to the golden era of protruding brows and _ook ook hurrh durrh_ talk? Been there, seen that. No problemo. But something called an _entity_ when one had a perfectly fine storage of synonyms and specieistic slurs for various types of alien...

Tentatively, he asked, "We're not...talking about th' likes o' tha' bloody Natron again? Because if we _are_, I'm n-"

Zurg's face split into a nasty leer, and suddenly the clawed fingertips of his gauntlets seemed to shine sharper and deadlier than ever.

"Warpy, Warpy-Schmarpy, it's not for you to decide what kinds of enterprises your master orders you to engage in. Do I need to remind you again that hereabouts infidelity means death or worse? Hmm? Thought so. Likewise...we're not precisely dealing with undead space mummies here. Nay...I mean _no_. However, we are en route to harness the powers of an eminent entity, _another_ such in truth, as the fact that they can be _controlled_ has become quite pellucid..."

Perhaps unwittingly, Zurg raised a hand to his temple and started fidgeting with the strap of his eye patch. It might have been a mere coincidence, but in Warp's opinion, muttering concurrently about the unleashing of formidable beings of an unknown character sounded very ominous.

"What's exactly going on? _What _are these beings you're talking about?" Darkmatter exhaled through his teeth, leaning back in his purple-padded chair, arms folded across his chest. "Ya haven't been...whatchamacallit...meddling in th' affairs of _wizards_, have ya? 'Cause ya shoul' well know tha' mutterin' mystic gobbledygook in pentacles an' suchlike's really _dangerous_! Which is exactly why most power-hungerers avoid reachin' out to the...uh...Other Side; usually such contacts turn against their summoners an' wreak more havoc than help achieve any actual gain. Besides, what do ya _know_ about this magickcK, or whatever those black-clad, raccoon-faced, twiggy wannabe-witches call it these days?"

Zurg suddenly looked uncomfortable, his fingers starting to play a restless tattoo against the tabletop. "Well...uh...so what if I have? But I'm not so damn bonkers as to ruin my well-burnished floors with chalk marks and ugly chicken-scratches! That's a definite nada! Moreover, I'm not referring to _spirits_, but...uh...well, craters, I'm not sure what the bloody buggers are. But, rest assured they aren't puffs of floating gas, or the intelligent shades of some color, or anything like that. As for containing them, I have one such being graciously accompanying me on this very journey!"

"O rly?" Darkmatter nodded sagely. "So that's the reason you're wearing that patch, eh? Cotcha in th' eye before ya were able to _control_ it?"

A deep, oppressive hush fell in the briefing room. And yes, there it was, a fleeting twitch of panic upon that ridiculous-looking upside-down bucket. Warp's lip curled. He'd flung the comment at Zurg only as a jibe, but apparently had stabbed a nerve instead.

"Cease that eyeballing, Darkmatter; my eyeball's none of your confounded business! And it's working fine, thank you very much."

Even though Warp's stomach still grumbled, he had lost his appetite. So...the head honcho had decided to dabble in the eldritch arts. He was not sure whether to believe in the outcome, though; so far he'd for the most part heard nasty rumors about a handful of anonymous tyrants who'd perished in mysterious ways after squinting at too many battered books laden with weird symbols, perhaps leaving behind a pair of gently smoking boots. Nameless and far away, except...well.

Unwittingly, he shuddered at the thought. Never, ever had he revealed what precisely had happened during those few moments alone with Natron, deep within his ghastly temple. Oh, some kind of retro-ish, ancient-Egyptian-mixed-with-sci-fi tech had been involved, but this loony, life-sucking pile of wrappings had clearly shared a few drinks and maybe an ornate scroll signed in blood with something from the realms the saner overlords only timidly whispered about.

Ugh, he had to stop brooding over that stupid memory! The more his mind played table tennis with the disgusting experience, the more frequently it popped up to pester the small hairs on the back of his neck. It was past, only past! Gone, bye-bye, sayonara! He sincerely hoped this Past was not going to rise out of the ground before him, leering, arms wide open in greeting.

Now, a deep frown darkened the few age lines etched between his brows. "Oh, an' this whole matter o' _keys_...I think I geddit now. Ya want me t' fetch some bloody keys so tha' ya can unlock some creature o' pure, dripping vileness from its ancient prison an'...holy damn." He placed one palm over his forehead, and hissed with frustration. "It's so unbelievably, indescribably cliché! Egads, ya can't be serious. _Ya really can't._ It's so trite it simply _can't_ be happenin' in real life! _It can't!_ No, really, I'm starting to reckon ya were better off wi' those fanged cabbages or whatever-"

Then, half-snorting, half-groaning, Warp caught Zurg's aspect. The old emperor was sitting rigidly opposite to him, not a glint of twisted amusement in the redness of his eyes. Or one eye, in this case. When he spoke, his voice resembled liquid silk.

"Do not trifle with me, Darkmatter; this is my last warning. I'm not referring to any puny, pathetic imps some amateur conjurer might attempt to ensnare, but to true, great beings of frost, fire, air...to ancient entities that once roamed the many dimensions of this universe, or as those archaic legends name them, the Nine Worlds. Moreover, I _indeed know_ how to force them to bow before me, for I have procured perhaps the greatest source of wisdom and knowledge that the ancient realms ever witted, and now it is mine, mine alone! HAHAHAHAHAH! Soon, all those puling, mewling peoples shall kneel maudlin in the ashes of their former glory, lamenting the-"

Zurg blinked, and coughed.

"Alas, I tell myself to forsake this galling habit of gloating ere aught...hrhmmh..._before anything_ much has happened, but...well. Back to the business." He stood up with a jerk and flung the corner of his cloak over one arm. "Indeed, this depthless well of wisdom is now bound to my command, and mine only, and this rare mead of lore I shall enjoy unto the gloaming of the hereafter! Don't believe me? Perhaps you ought to meet him yourself!"

"Uh...meet what? I..." Warp stammered. Nevertheless, the spell of mania had overwhelmed the emperor, who grabbed the shorter man's arm with a pincer-like grip, and started dragging him out of the room.

"He's an _Ettin_, or at least _was_...not sure exactly _what_ one should call him now. Yet heed your slippery tongue whilst having an audience. He's one heckuva picky little fancypants when it comes to a morsel of perfectly normal, friendly sarcasm; the puffed-up popinjay."

Well, well, finally someone made you the underdog in the endless rally of insults, Darkmatter thought grimly. This detail hardly relieved the situation: someone able to boss Evil Emperor Zurg around didn't sound promising at all. Moreover, the impression that Zurg was distinctly afraid of his captive only strengthened. Of course, the purple prima donna would try his best to conceal this, but...over the years, Warp had learned to read certain, subtle signs correctly.

Still grasping the mercenary's arm painfully, the emperor swept down a maze of corridors, the loose vacuum cleaner nozzle clanking along as he did so. He stomped over to a sturdy door, punched in the access code, and consequently shoved Warp into the semi-gloom.

"We have a guest, Bölþornsson, albeit he seems a wee bit reluctant to enter."

Darkmatter froze on the threshold. As he stared at the handsome face beneath the burning eyes, the mass of fair hair sneaking and winding to and fro on its own accord, and the stump of a severed neck ending to mere nothingness, he realized this was Natron all over again. Or, perhaps even something worse.

* * *

Please let me know what you think about the story so far. :-)


	6. Chapter 6

AN: Anyone still reading this? If not, this just might be my last update. While I like writing, this particular story has required so much external research into various topics, that I'd really appreciate hearing back from people a bit more. It's not like I'm inherently fluent in Old Norse or alliterative verse or anything. ;-)

* * *

"People afterwards called him Leif the Lucky. But his father, Eric, said that one account should balance the other, that Leif had rescued the ship's crew, and that he had brought the Trickster to Greenland. This was the priest." —A.M. Reeves, _The Norse Discovery of America_, 11906 HE*

"Often throughout the day he turned himself into the likeness of a salmon and hid himself in the place called Fránangr-Falls. Then he thought to himself what stratagems the Asas might have recourse to in order to catch him. — Now he was taken truceless, and was brought with them into a certain cave. — There he lies in bonds till the Weird of the gods." —_The Prose Edda __of Snorri Sturluson_, Translated by Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur, 11916 HE / Rasmus B. Anderson, 11879 HE

*The Holocene calendar of _the Earth_, reconstructed by Ph.D. µπ 'Micropie' Gaugino

CHAPTER VI

Quotes, quotes, quotes. Quotes and bloody quotes. If _only_ he could've gotten a moment's peace from that interminable, geeky gabbling about obscure minutiae no sane person ever would be able to recall perfectly.

But noooo. On and on it went, infodump after infodump. On top of that, Zurg had strictly forbidden him to blast the pesky brain pod into spinning quanta, no matter how irritating the 'lectures' might evolve. And...perhaps the boss was right, at least partially. His knowledge of this boondocks of a planet verged on abysmal, and if ever he wished to bring this little adventure into a successful end...well. He'd just better try to endure it teeth-grittingly.

Oh, a robust frequency scanner could always detect anomalies and impending dangers in the landscape. However, he doubted such data would be of much use in a situation involving eldritch wossnames that probably defied both logic and the conventional laws of physics.

Warp's scowl swept over the forbidding landscape of snow and ice broadening out below. Often, it scarcely distinguished itself from the cloud-bedecked sky in the hair's-breadth-away-from-the-polar-circle, washy, brumal day. He would've very, very heartily liked to hunt down the jeering bastard who had named this blasted hole _Greenland_, and strangled him for this insolent bout of misinformation. The only green bits he had come across so far were the gently swaying palm trees of Mahambas 6 in the recesses of his imagination. Fine, maybe an Ice Age had conquered the planet since those far-flung days of first colonization, but hadn't these dweebs ever heard of _updating_?

So...if the boss's ancestors had jumped out of the protoplasm of this frost fest, no wonder he loathed anything relating to _white_. If a color ever could induce nausea, this was the place to be, indeed.

The very least, his personal plumbing system didn't feel exactly tip-top. Disbelief and apprehension had befriended one another and now larked along the highways of his gut, making his stomach emit suspicious grumbling noises.

He, Warp Darkmatter, soldier of evil fortune, murderer many times over, renegade... For him, fear usually remained a semi-unknown concept on his wayfares smelling of easy dinero and the perfumes of a fawning gaggle of chicks. This one included neither, but already seemed like a déjà-vu of his trip to Planet X.

His grip on the steering controls hardened.

Well. From what he had understood, the mission's ultimate purpose wasn't to unleash one of those standard-issue grunty cave trolls, but a shapeshifting _something_, a slyboots that had apparently accomplished much mayhem before his final capture and imprisonment some thousands of years back. Hah. Zurg might've claimed he hailed the world from the summit of his purpleness, but in Darkmatter's opinion, this time the Emperor's ducky pond of reason had been emptied of both birdies and water.

Trickster figures, whatever the mythology, never boded well, especially one as evasive as this, if the legends in question indeed did build themselves upon something firmer than soggy marmalade. The elemental problem with tricksters converged to the fact that...well...they were _tricksy_, disgustingly cunning. With such talent, they usually could detect loopholes even inside a solid block of terillium carbonic alloy. Failing this, then at least the microscopic gaps in the atomic structure opened up a whole new world of possibilities. These might appear infinitesimally small, but a meticulous enough sod might still wriggle through eventually.

Oh, he'd long prided himself on his masterly shrewdness, what with managing to fool the idiots of Star Command ever since the Academy and everything, but what would he pay for half a cupful of extra guile right now, not to mention this very handy ability to shapeshift! He could rocket off, and, in case Zurg's bloodhounds uncovered his trail, turn himself into a bloody clump of snow for a few days, after which only the edge of the universe would limit his future choices.

As if that'd ever happen.

He harrumphed at the thought, and continued flying low over the ground, keeping one eye on the coordinates pullulating across the console screen, and hoping that the outmoded maps his crew relied on made any sense. Well, there was only a single spot called _Helheim_ upon this dismal island, a large glacier that apparently loomed right in the near horizon, although he could barely discern the difference between it and the rest of the vista, including reefs and patches of frozen sea. Yet, that had better be what they were looking for. His patience would not carry him much further, especially as Zurg's bounties grew scrimier year after year. This time he'd managed to negotiate a bonus for—as he had put it—High-Risk Meddling with the Supernatural. Yet, the measly sum still did not much tickle his cultivated taste buds accustomed to the leisure of his early years as Agent Z.

After a while, he switched the controls to the landing mode and barked a few orders into the comlink. The ground below supposedly sported a rocky terrain underneath the whiteness, so his vessel should not have been in danger of sinking into icy water. Behind him, the blurry outline of another space ship, crammed full of miscellaneous low-life lackeys, was just in view through the mist gathered here and there above the snow.

"Right. Where in blazes're we exactly headin'? Ya talked 'bout some...hinge-whatsits," the mercenary snorted at the accompanying brain pod, once the ships stagnated on firm ground and had burped out their mash of grubs, pods, hornets, and a flock of pseudo-scientific equipment.

"_Henge_, Mr. Darkmatter," the brain pod corrected, sheer exasperation trilling in his voice. "Pardon me for mentioning this, but you're quite as impossible with the terminology of this quest as Master himself. Huh, he still calls the noble tongue of the Norsemen _Old Horse_, although that might be just an excuse to vex me. Cannot precisely tell when he's acting serious. Anyhow, the little we could deduce from the riddles of the Ettin, the henge, which is a circular earthwork, ought to lie somewhere hereabouts. It apparently serves as the gateway to the outer deserts of Helheim, where the Key-"

Warp groaned inwardly, impatience rushing through his arteries. Oh, he certainly was not the average Tradeworldian wretch with wet meringue for brains, but the concise introduction to Zurg's present scheme—and one of the most intricate ever—had been poured over him simply too brusquely during the past few days. The results of several years' data mining, shady mythological figures from the half-extinct cultures of the Northern Earth, snatches of cartography, history, poetry, weirdly pronounced names written in an unknown alphabet, and the nastily itching threat of the Other Side...all sprawled in a jumbled, sticky lump somewhere in the back of his mind. It proved hard to extract details from this mess, especially when it came to those foreign expressions.

"We _are_ in Helheim now, aren't we?" he pointed towards the bleak glacier with one banana-sized finger. "Or, are ya tellin' me we're supposed to find its alternate universe evil twin or summat?"

"Well, yes, in a manner of speaking," the brain pod coughed. "I must say, I expected you to gain better insight into Old Norse mythology and today's...uh...assignment from my well-crafted slides. Eh, well, I did mention that the Northlands carry many names derived straight from the millennia-old tales of the Nordic peoples, which some name _Vikings_, albeit this is much disputed in later historical studies, giving that the national-romanticists of the 119th century HE designed this term to denote-"

His ramble shriveled down to a small squeak with a question mark in the end, after his eyes strayed upward and met Darkmatter's furious lour.

"GET TO THE POINT, will ya?"

"Yes, yes, ah...uh...it is my theory, that these sites bearing such remarkable names were, or are, hotspots of certain quality, where dimensions overlap one another and distort the fabric of the universe, allowing a person comparably effortless access to other realms, given that he or she can pass through the wards of the Portal itself. Presently, we stand ashore Helheim, from the ice-cold banks of which we shall reach out to the dark dominions of the daughter of the one Master strives to free from his ancient bonds; Hel the Eternal, Hel's home, _Helheimr_."

Despite his well-warmed space armor, Darkmatter shivered involuntarily in the hazy winterscape. The pod must've fallen off its rocker already before becoming this half-anonymous specimen of Zurg's creepshow, which as a mere concept already plucked at his nerves. An arm and a leg, maybe, but to give up one's whole body? Just plain disgusting. Perhaps the weirdo had been the spit-licker of some chthonic cult in his former life, if he could blather on about the most dangerous portions of the mission all misty-eyed and zealous devotion purring in his voice.

Oh yes, and this Hel character herself... A recollection untangled itself twitchily from the heap of half-ruminated information, the image of a woman in long, sweeping robes. The imagination of some bygone artist had trapped the figure on the woodcut, exaggerating the impression here and there, but that notion still could not brush away the square, dour visage, the outstretched arms bulging with something far other than excess indulgence in godly delicacies, or the gray figures cowering behind her throne. The true purpose of the latter he could not hark back, but gave him the creeps nonetheless. There had been other portrayals of her in the lot, teetering towards the fabulous and quite ticklingly sultry, but this had somehow stood out the most due to its harsh...whatchamacallit..._realism_.

Now they were about to steal into this land of...

Another thought elbowed the first out of the limelight, causing him to blink and stare at the frosty desolateness as if from a slightly different point of view. It did not improve the prospects at all.

"Hel, _Hel_...ya don't mean...? When ya humans blather on about _going to hell_, it-"

"Ah-heh-heh, yes...nothing really to do with the...hot place. Originally, before imported beliefs mingled with the older cultures, it simply served as a metaphor for dying among the Norsemen."

"How friggin' jolly," Darkmatter grunted. "Just wha' I wanted: to saunter into th' living room o' another life-force-suckin' occult bugger. Let's ge' on wi' it, then; how low do we need to sink wi' this condemned mumbo jumbo, draw multiple rabbits from top hats to find this bleedin' henge, or wha'? Besides, still don't understan' why _I_ must play th' damn hero, an' do most o' th' dirty work alone. Why couldn't th' bucket-brain rush 'ere to freeze his keister off himself, as he's already neck deep in this mystic drivel?"

"Uh, because he's seeking for the First Key himself on the very hour, relying directly on the wight's guidance? I say, did you deign to read my memo at all? Umh...anyhow..."

The brain pod reached out one segmented appendage and produced from the recesses of his exoskeleton a silver disk the size of a beer mat. A thick, amber lens gleamed faintly in the middle, surrounded by densely spiraling runic writing on both sides.

"This most intriguing wherewith furnished us with the means required to expose the entrance to the well-guardian's hideout. It's called a _galðr-lens_, which stands for a _spell-lens_ in our mundane tongue. Ah, required seven break-ins into museums all over this planet to discover two undamaged specimens. Anyway...firstly, place it over your eye to evaluate at the vicinity for signs of any feasible gateways. I daresay you'll recognize one upon first glance. Then, you must repeat the incantation after me when you occupy the conjuration circle. The verses we briefly practiced, that is. I'm afraid the person actually endeavoring to disinter the Key must perform the ritual of unveiling. Alas, we cannot storm in with a small army of hornets, clattering away and inanely blasting everything that moves into sub-atomic particles. Nevertheless, we shall guard argus-eyed at the Portal while you're in. The Emperor values your talent for dexterity and deviousness, and therefore-"

"Fine, fine." The mercenary yanked the disc from the brain pod's clutches, turning it over in the clawed fingers of his mechanical hand.

"Eh, it is safe to remove your visor. The air is a tad on the chilly side, but not poisonous. The lens, as I've gathered, functions better when in direct contact with genuine, breathing flesh and blood. Master obviously experienced a trifle of trouble because of his own armor, as he explicitly refuses to dismantle even a minor portion of it while in public. Oh, and..." Timid and jittery as the pod already was, now his voice turned unusually fainthearted. Perhaps inadvertently, his bloodshot gaze jumped down to regard Darkmatter's robotic arm. "Uh...almost forgot this, but...the exosuit of our Emperor apparently blacked entirely out at some instance during the antecedent expedition. I advise you to keep a wary eye on your own cybernetic modifications, lest this phenomenon should recur. It may somehow be tied to the inherent nature of these meta-realms. The very least, Master did proceed past the overlapping region joining our world and the borders of the dimension beyond, perhaps slipping into some distant frontier of the mysterious _Niflheimr_, th-"

"Enough wi' tha' bleedin' claptrap! I'm not getting any bonuses for listenin' to random geekwad blethers about Viprinces or whatever wretched buggers for hours on end." With that, Darkmatter released his helmet, grimaced once or twice after the blast of 250 K weather, and crammed the lens over one eye. He was standing almost on the bank of the great, lifeless plain of imperceptibly journeying ice now, the troupe of toadies hovering behind in a haphazard semicircle.

A small, surprised intake of breath hissed through his lips, as he caught the vista through the slightly cracked, insect-infested lens of polished amber. He had expected to find only carcasses of long-gone mosquitoes to float blurrily in front a smudged landscape of snowy forlornness tinted with a mawkish shade of honey, but never the great, inky black surfs licking greedily at the rocky littoral. It was as if the churning heavens had swallowed all the erstwhile whiteness: the almost inky ground beneath his boots shimmered with a faint greenish tinge. No traces of the amber's characteristic, warm tones existed anywhere: he was peering at an entirely otherworldly, somber wilderness much reminiscent of some obscure black metal band's album covers, dripping with misanthropy and depression.

As the dark waves only continued their mindless lapping, Warp turned to the left, holding the disk firmly over one eye. Almost immediately, crude standing stones swam into view, beyond which rose an embankment piled high with lichen-clad rocks, surrounding an even larger tumulus that possessed the bleak aspect of a burial mound.

Warp suddenly found his throat oddly parched. Moistening his lips, he rasped, "Oy, pod. Think I found yer hotspot. So, let's ge' over wi' this whole pansy poetry recitation; don't wanna associate mysel' wi' some maidenly sissyboys plucking at lutes an' mewling on about roses an' unicorns."

"I assure you we aren't dealing with roses and unicorns here..." the brain pod responded curtly. "Now, pay heed to the intonation while you speak the incantation, lest you should pronounce something vital incorrectly; special care ought to be taken with the verse concerning _Gangleri_ and_ Rúnatýr_. Regrettably, I have not fully grasped the meaning of those kennings, but Master's enunciation was somewhat patchy, and that may also have contributed to the loss of electricity in the nanocircuits. Oh well. Now, if you would sit down over here..."

The brain pod pointed at a group of concentric circles a handful of minions were drawing on the surface of the hard-packed snow. Rune staves had been stuck to the ground intermittently along the rim of the outermost ring, while a spindly brazier hunched lopsidedly in the very middle. Warp glared at the slipshod assembly in disgust. The wizardly servant caught the look, and coughed.

"We are forced to improvise, as the ancient lore has, for the most part, been rent asunder by the talons of time. Yet even with this ersatz reproduction, we were able to locate the entrance to the fell, despite Emperor Zurg's hardy skepticism."

Without another syllable, Darkmatter stepped into the inmost circle, snatching the longest rune staff from the brain pod's grasp. Well, he would not be able to escape this bloody escapade into the rampaging grounds of skeletal ferrymen and Dark Streams of Doom in any case. If he happened to meet a giant, three-headed hound on the way, he'd certainly demand another incentive for Having to Endure Damn Stupid Clichés with a Straight Face.

Therefore, he might just get on with it. He soon found his mouth trying to accommodate itself around the shapes of the weird, unintelligible sentences the stooge orated, while he squinted through the spell-lens and held the inane stick aloft; a poorly carven piece of wood he had the urge to powderize with a single crunch of his powerful fist.

_"__Þurisaz, þurisaz, þurisaz! __Urðar lokur haldi þér öllum..."_

Furthermore, his brain kept interfering with the ceremony by hurling out thoughts like '_This is stupid.'_ and '_Nothing's gonna happen for sure.'_, while the already kindled, chilly dread crept crawling further up his backbone. It was not natural to poke one's nose into such a lair of occultish affairs. Improvised conjuring circles...craters, were they truly attempting to infiltrate the dominion of _a death goddess_ with the aid of these mildewing pieces of drift scrap, and some stinking incense probably fabricated from mud and a smattering of weeds pilfered from Rhizome? Yet, what if...what if this abracadabra truly _worked_? Bloody blazars, what if it _did_ work?

It felt so utterly surreal, crouching there upon the hard snow, and gazing into the ill-omened other-realm through the little peephole, while his left pupil registered mere unrelenting wintriness.

The Emperor _had_ succeeded, after all, and...

It started to snow. Small flakes pirouetted down upon the stationary knot of Zurg's toadies, the whistle of the rising wind accompanying the mismatched duet of the two villains. A couple of times, Darkmatter gave an unconscious stutter, as the arctic air bit into his skin accustomed to much milder climates. The metal of the talisman felt like it might freeze against his face any moment now.

He was just chewing at a particularly difficult expression, when something happened to the dispassionate surroundings. First, the air rippled as if seen through a heat haze, and then, in a nigh-on audible _whoompf_, all snowiness vanished, in the manner of a great dust sheet being pulled aside.

Here, Darkmatter dithered, partly because of the scale of the sudden change, partly because of the tension accumulating in his chest. The disk slipped in his bulky fingers, and his tongue tripped over the spiky clumps of consonants and wide walls of vowels. Somehow, he yet managed to pull the threads of the fast-fraying verse together, and the ululating _'_—_aeeoghuiierrm'_ joined an intelligible word. At least, a word understandable to the brain pod.

A few paces behind him, a wave of trepidation had hit also the latter person, now nervously scanning the proximity while still elocuting the last dregs of the incantation. This was for a good reason, as something not supposed to occur had just done so.

Indeed, nobody had warned Darkmatter that the whole visible landscape would disintegrate and recompose itself into a vista of netherworldly gloominess. The dark, icy stream passed its tongues over the shore curving out of sight somewhere beyond newly mushroomed hills, and to the left, the two spaceships shone with their absence. When the last phoneme died on his lips, he twisted his head round to gaze confusedly at his only companion in this new realm, the brain pod. If a skull-less, skinless organ of though without pores was able to perspire, the sod was definitely doing so now.

The grub cluster had dematerialized entirely, and so had the gaggle of hornets further down the slight slope. Even if they were as retarded as decapitated hens, they still created a certain atmosphere of safety. That would have been especially welcome against the foreboding shadow of the monolithic grave mound looming before them, wreathed in rags of gray mist. Darkmatter could also discern other details of the so-called Portal better now: the huge slab of stone marking the entrance to the barrow, and the snarling, glaring faces wrought into the standing stones. For the most part, these did not bear any semblance to those tree-hugging hillbillies that still sparsely populated this planet, and although their eyes were only pieces of carven rock, they seemed to possess a cunning, startling intelligence of their own while they stared at the intruders.

The nasty sense of sepulchral hollowness in the mercenary's innards only deepened. He didn't like the look of this _at all_.

"Blazes, did Zurg give me one o' his most miserable lobotomy experiments for a tour guide, or wha'?" Warp hissed through his teeth, looking daggers at the other survivor. "Ya told tha' only this condemned henge was supposed t' become visible! NOW WHAT? How're we goin' to take a hike outta this blazin' hellhole, when even my ride's been swallowed by sum bat-brained gothgirl's freak-o daydream?"

"We...ah...pursue our quest?" the minion piped up nervously. "A-albeit, I...erm...d-did caution you about the risks of inexact pronunciation. Th-"

His sentence was cut short by the sudden jolt that shook the earth, sending him sprawling onto the hard, rocky ground. Darkmatter's head pivoted back to face the grave mound, while he, almost unconsciously, attempted to activate the ion blaster of his robotic arm. This was responded only by a pathetic _click-click_ issuing somewhere from under the casing. The clawed fingers jerked feebly once or twice before becoming utterly inert.

Before their anxious countenances, the enormous tumulus was trembling. Pebbles and dust cascaded down the sloping sides, and the thick slab jerked. Once, twice, thrice, the ground jolting harder on every strike.

The only, single gateway to the barrow was being pushed open from the inside.

Through the widening, black gap in the formerly sealed entrance, steam began pouring forth, mingling with the crescendo'ing grunts and heaves of _something_ laboring under the weight of the multi-ton boulder.

And, behind the dumbstruck duo, the waters of the gelid stream no longer only tainted the world with their life-imbibing inkiness, but now frothed and bubbled, as if in sudden wrath.

* * *

A glassy bridge, stretching out far into the horizon, far into the sun-washed billows hanging in the pale, infinite sky. Colors of every hue and intensity rippled through the strange, transparent material resembling neither stone nor metal: it was as if light itself had been turned solid and woven into a gently arching plane, constantly alive with the dance of refractions within. Only the nine winds of the heavens supported this massive structure, and on, on it sloped; down, down towards a snow-riddled mountainside of immeasurable steepness. At some point, the harsh, unyielding rock joined the fluid play of light, forming a small battleground where coils of rime attempted to snake up the bridge and quench its mellow warmth, like that of a stone which has lain bare in the spring sun. Elsewhere, strands of light extending from the main body endeavored piercing the deep firn, as if finally willing to force a summer upon that dour world of ever-winter.

Where two rival realms meet, war is always afield...

"Twice hast thou sent forth thy messengers, and thrice now have I told unto thee, King of Útgarðr, the answer of Alföðr! He shalt nay harken more of thy war-mongering lies, borne on the tip of thy guileful serpent-tongue. Thus he bideth thee to take thy leave, thee _and_ thy brother, even though he greatly regretteth to lay these tidings before the salt-sprinkled feet of the Mead-Brewer," the man standing astride on the Bridge shouted to the two figures opposing him across the section of roiling elements.

The massively built, red-haired warrior menacing the first speaker from a knee-high snow dune folded his arms across his chest, and snorted a cloud of vapor through his nose. Whereas his hair usually coiled calmly on its own, it now fanned out almost horizontally, resembling living fire more than ever. It was as if twenty centuries had been suddenly lifted from his shoulders: straight and furious, the King's stature rose above the backdrop of distant firs, his beard bristling and the wildfire of his eyes dyeing the iron of his helmet an aggressive orange.

"Serpent-tongue, indeed! I should sew thy lips shut for that impudence, great-nephew, blood-traitor of thy kin! Oh, but who am I to swear oaths to one snot-nosed sapling of a bridge-thrall barely forty hundred winters old, as many and a muckle of ye basking in the corpse-light of your bygone glories have blossomed from the fruits of our sisters. Half-breeds that have defiled their noble bloodlines forevermore, the lot of ye! Akin to that oaf denser than his hammer, the slaughterer of my erstwhile king and father, oft journeying to wreak genocide in our frost-home, lacking the measliest of reasons for his stark-mad acts, other than mayhaps finding our kin repulsive in his mead-hazed eyes! I shall nay accept these tidings, as thou well kennest, but demand the Thing to be forgathered!"

King Ægir, the white-haired man seething next to the fire-tempered King of Útgarðr, bunched a gauntleted fist into one open palm, producing a thunderclappy sound. With a couple of strides, he advanced to the cross-section of frost and light.

"Forget thy fancy words worth the glibber tongue of a skald, brother; 'tis a good trashing this vainglorious brat needeth," he snarled. "Perchance then he shalt withdraw his overweening presence thence, black-eyed and tawdry teeth scattered all athwart the Bridge! Alas, how hath the vigor of guðr-blood waned, as a toddler, barely taken from the breast of his wet-nurse, oughteth to munch his morn-pap with dentures!"

The person addressed grimaced, gold indeed flashing between his lips. "Be ware, for fain shall I sound the Gjallarhorn, and call upon this 'oaf denser than his hammer'!" He patted the great bronze lur curving around his frame. "Then shalt the ever-blest Bifröst mayhaps behold the final demise of two of the last Ettin kings!"

"Halt, ye two!" the King of Útgarðr snapped, intervening with the impending brawl. "And rammest thou thy vacuous threats where Skinfaxi cannot drag his sun-chariot! I do nay wet my kirtle afore the Hammerhand, for my magic far surpasses his pitiful toys these days. Yet doth it verily be thus, that thy lord refuses to meet us, and offers naught but such rudeness in return? Hark and heed, for we had a pact of auld, a Covenant of Peace, which neither side was to trample underfoot, lest the threat of the War rist anew! Hither have we fared, far from the strongholds of Útgarðr and Læsø, clad in our finest mail and burnished Völundr-forged armor, Naglfar anchored at the mouth of the firth past yon mountain, presenting thee with a boon and a gift, and our welcome doth be _this_? Wherefore botherest nay the auld Wanderer to meet us eye to eye, beard to beard? Wherefore chooseth he to malinger in his high halls, instead of greeting us in person? I would have deemed him tired of weaving these fruitless wars that shall merely bring a doom upon us all, yet I must be mistaken, then."

The messenger on the Bridge was now angry enough to draw his sword, and brandish it at the King over twice his height. The act appeared quite pitiful, however, as it seemed the Ettin could have merely extended an iron-gloved hand and snapped it in two like a termite-plagued toothpick, or simply burned the whole man down to a small pile of charcoal with the conflagration of his gaze.

"I told unto thee that the blame of thy hardships lieth nay upon our heads! No lady or lord of the high halls broketh the ur-sleep of the well-guardian."

"Shouldeth the matter stand thus or nay, the Wanderer shalt honor me with his presence, or-"

The deep boom of a war horn tore at the air.

The man with the bling-bling teeth might just have threatened to blow his instrument, but this sound reverberated from the opposite direction. Slightly bemused, the trio turned their noses toward a trodden path leading to the roots of the Bridge, a path whose sides were now gouged with footprints the size of small rowing boats, the way having had been too narrow for the Ettins to promenade along. It soon dropped out of sight down a steep mountainside.

Now, however, something silvery moved up and down at the end of it, like a very fancy bobfloat upon an indecisive geyser, becoming more visible by the second.

The horn sounded again, and now a visage displayed itself beneath the object revealed as a rounded helmet with a spectacle-like eyeguard, not unlike those the kings wore. On a closer inspection, the newcomer appeared to share also their height and bearing, but his countenance was still smooth and void of the weathered rigor.

Whether this young chap was handsome or not, depended on the eye of the beholder. A cavewoman might have gotten her furry knickers in a twist over him, whereas someone permanently fawning over dot-nosed, sparkly anime bishies could just as well have thrown up. Whatever the impression, his corn-yellow beard jutted out with tight curls, his pupilless eyes burned with the blue flame of Ægir, and his muscular chest heaved with the effort of climbing.

He skidded to a stop, and clapped his fists together, bowing to the redheaded Ettin.

"What meaneth this haste, Hrímvaldi? What manner of tidings bringest thou, so that thou moot run all the way hither, brow agleam with sweat?"

"A matter of the utmost urgency, my King," the young man panted. "Someone broketh into thy old fort in Bálagarðr. This vile mongrel-breath tooketh th-"

"WHAT?" the King bellowed, evidently guessing the outcome, his eyes blazing deep crimson. "What Hel-curst bastard toreth the wards and dwarf-locks asunder, spells I spun together from the Elder Fire ere the age of machines in Miðgarðr began? Didth any watchful eye ensnare the likeness of this thief?"

"Egðir the Runesmith did, my King. Toldeth of a robed, cloaked man clad in a strange helmet, one-eyed and wild of laughter. Furthermore, this I do nay fain say unto thee, yet Egðir swears by the blood of Ymir that he beheld the well-guardian's head accompanying this thug, borne along upon a crawling pod such as the beings of many curious shapes and sizes dwelling in Miðgarðr might fashion themselves."

The much shorter messenger still guarding the Bridge had to shield his face, as the King of Útgarðr burst into a column of blinding, scorchingly hot fire, roaring with rage as he did so. The moment of uncontrolled fury lasted only for a moment, however, and the impossibility sneering at all the laws of physics took the form of an armored man again.

Then, the King laughed, the raucous contempt rolling and echoing in the great abyss beneath the Bridge.

"Oh,_ one-eyed_, indeed? So doth this be wherefore the blithering addle-head and his personal petting zoo refused to grace us with their presence, eh? Verily, Thought and Memory must have grown senile and deplumed with age, as it seemeth they no longer soar freely through the wide heavens, but thus fall into the deepmost gorge of folly and madness."

Then, without warning, the mighty Ettin raised his hands, and struck the Bridge with an appalling power. Massive whips of fire lashed out from his fingers, and a swirling, blue bolt of energy materializing out of thin air hit the joint of light and frost. The force of the blow sent the messenger tumbling down into the stream somewhere far, far below. Cracks, and blisters caused by the fire-tongues erupted upon the glassy surface, and with terrible speed, the Bridge itself began to erode, huge chunks of swirling color falling down after the man whose screams had already evaporated into the high winds.

This rapid chain reaction continued, until not a single, wavering strand of Bifröst remained in sight. Upon the crag, the King of Útgarðr surveyed grimly his handiwork. Ægir, his arms folded across his chest, bore an almost indifferent aspect. Only the young courier was struck by evident shock.

"Hrrmpf. Well, that shalt speed things up a smidgen, e'en if the wrong namesake now standeth in the helm of Naglfar. 'Tis nay but the Wanderer that cunneth hide trickery up his sleeve."

With that, the King turned his back on the destruction, and stomped off into the snow.

Only tiny motes of frost glimmered and danced in the void once graced by the elusive play of the Bridge's light.

* * *

In the throne room of the airborne Dreadnaught, Emperor Zurg turned a strange stone object over and over in his hands, his helmet twisted into an ear-to-ear grin of manic glee. One could almost see saliva frothing through the grille; such was the magnitude of his excitement.

"Uhuhuhuh! Jim-crackin'-dandy, it's mine, mine, a little evil goldmine of mine, uuhahaah, I'm feeling so trickety-boo I could conga with the stars! One down, two more to go!" Zurg twirled on the spot, holding the Key high above his horns, his trailing robes eddying about him. "Now, where's that Darkmatter lallygagging? Tch, get him on the horn anon, he's late _again_!"

The wight, one of the mightier Ettins of old, now constrained to Zurg's service with archaic bonds and spell-chains linked straight to the forgotten source of Elder Fire and Frost, peered direly at the crazy, capering Emperor from a gloomy corner near the seat of power. The winding tresses bobbed to and fro, as if he were shaking his head.

Through the incessant whooping, the Emperor could not catch the ill-boding verses the wight started humming with a low, dolorous pitch, the otherworldly echoes in his voice mere figments of whispers, soft as a feather brushing at velvet.

_"__Void thy vaunting | cursed thy cheer _

_For__ the worm writheth | serpent of sky-seas_

_Walls weep with venom | verges of worlds nine_

_Bifröst br__eaketh | all of __Útgarðr rageth_

_Spear__-age, sword-age | shields shall shatter_

_Wind-time, varg-time | afore all shalt fail..."_


End file.
